May 2006 DVD Dimevision, Vol. 1: That’s The Way I Have Fun paid homage to the memory of late Pantera and Damageplan guitarist ‘Dimebag’ Darrell Abbott, the DVD culled from footage Dimebag had shot with a camcorder over a number of years on the road and at home. The label of Pantera drummer and brother Vincent ‘Vinnie’ Paul Abbott, Big Vin Records, oversaw its release. Successive DVD Dimevision, Vol. 2: Roll With It Or Get Rolled Over will be issued in November 2017 via Metal Blade Records.

“I would say with the Dimevision volumes we are doing, our first intentions on it – and as far as with this volume, as well – were to let people see Darrell outside of being onstage or on the road,” shares Rita Haney, long-time girlfriend of Dimebag. “See how he was at home, the way he lived. The one thing about Darrell was he was a character. It wasn’t just a stage presence, or just a rock ’n’ roll side to him; he was that way 24/7, and he just was always comical, always creative. There’s just so much footage of him at home entertaining himself that I really wanted to share that with people, so that they knew that what you saw was what you got.

“Hopefully that lets people even more into the behind-the-scenes of living at home, and living with Dime. Plus with the Dimevision releases, it gives us a chance to release music that he recorded on his own, even if it was parodies and just for fun – just as four-tracks. He had so much fun with the music, even when he was off, and with music that had nothing to do with Pantera. It gives us a place to get to share that as well. It’s coming together.”

Dimebag happened to be a character personality ever since the day the long-time couple first met. “He had kind of big ears and braces…,” Rita remembers. “Well, no… He didn’t have his braces yet – just big teeth. We were eight-years-old (laughs), and little bratty kids – the both of us. I pushed him off of his bicycle. I don’t remember what he said to me, but we used to play in the neighbourhood together. When I first met him, that’s how he was (laughs). Even back then, he was still that comedian, even if he didn’t know it yet. He was just somebody you wanted to be around.”

As Pantera’s profile skyrocketed, Dimebag arguably maintained that same personality. “With me, I wouldn’t say that he changed,” Rita submits. “He evolved of course, because with that comes larger responsibilities as far as finances and behaviour. Just things that you’re supposed to take care of, and growing up. As a person though, no, he never really changed. He was still that prankster, still that kid that made you laugh. He didn’t change; he just had more things at his disposal which he could create debauchery with, I guess.”

Albeit a prankster, Dimebag nevertheless still took his respective craft quite seriously. “Absolutely,” Rita seconds. “He was one of those people that when it came to playing, I wouldn’t come out and say it came naturally, but it almost did in a sense. When he was a kid, he practised; he practised all the time. He wasn’t somebody who went and took a lot of lessons. He had a lot of help from his father (Jerry Abbott) who showed him some things, like when he wanted to play a song or this or that.

“Yeah though, he wasn’t big on reading music or theory, or anything like that. It just kind of came from within. In his heart and soul, he had a lot of… Like Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top) was one of his favourite guitar players, because Billy could take one note and hold it for eight bars. He didn’t need to noodle, or to pack in so many notes or riffs into one thing. He could just make it sing with one note, and he respected that so much. That was a lot of his style as well, too.”

As a musical child of the vinyl age, Dimebag would slow down long-players during his formative years and play alongside his favourite artists at the time. “And like I said, if he didn’t quite get something…,” Rita begins. “Because his dad owned a studio. Still does, I believe in Nashville. He grew up around musicians, down there recording and things like that. He got to experience that. His dad was really good about that; when he would grab a record and go ‘Hey, dad. I wanna learn this song,’ he would show him the notes, and Darrell would just take it from there. He started really playing his music I guess by ear, learning that way.”

Learning the craft of guitar and evolving both musically and mentally through the years, Dimebag learnt to roll with it or get rolled over, hence the title of Dimevision Vol. 2. “Darrell had a lot of little sayings that he would latch onto that he heard somewhere, that he would make his own,” Rita shares. “Like the term ‘getcha’ pull’; that’s an old moonshine term. You’d pass the jug around and getcha’ pull. That means to take a swig off of it, to get your drink, but he took that and just ran with it. It became to getcha’ pull out of life; get your slice, get you some of it – as much as you can. That was his whole meaning.

“One of his terms that he was saying a lot I would in say 2003, 2004 was ‘Roll with it or get rolled over.’ He was pretty much not happy with the things that had gone wrong with Pantera. He had always been Pantera; even if he called himself another band, in his heart he was still Pantera, and that’s pretty much how he meant it. That you roll with it, or get rolled over. It’s like ‘Take the punches.’

“He had left a voicemail… On the first part of the DVD, you’ll hear a part where it’s him. It’s a really horrible voicemail recording, but we tried to clean it up as best as we could. It was left on my answering machine, and it’s him saying ‘Roll with it or get rolled over.’ He was laying in his bunk, and it had been a hell of a day. He was like ‘Man, I’m so beat up,’ but that was the highs and lows of rock ’n’ roll. You’ve got to roll with it or get rolled over, and I just thought it would be appropriate for this volume since there’s a lot of rolling over and getting rolled over in it (laughs).”

Footage included on Dimevision, Vol. 2 was selected by Rita with the assistance of videographer Daryl ‘Bobby Tongs’ Amberger, Rob Fenn subsequently editing said footage. “It was really, really great,” she enthuses. “Bobby Tongs is a brother to me. We’ve known each other a long time; even when he was just a kid in the neighbourhood, he would come by Darrell’s house and watch him practice in the garage, or jam, or come by and get picks, or a couple of autographs. He’s a few years younger than us, but he’s been around a really long time. He was Darrell’s best friend out there on the road; they shared that whole thing with the camera. Bobby captured tons of stuff, and it was really a lot of fun. He got taught by the best. He knows his Dimevision; he sees it that way. It was smooth, it was funny.

“We laughed so much that we were both just crying over different things that we came across, whether it be just a photo of Vinnie and Darrell being small and holding this doll called Big Josh. We Googled it online to see what it was, because I’m going ‘I’ve never even heard of this.’ I’ve heard of all of your other little action figures, but never Big Josh. We laughed so hard about it. We came across this audio CD when we were looking for music tracks that had Darrell doing this whole thing in a Gene Simmons voice (Kiss bassist). It’s just an outtake where he’s laughing at himself, going ‘Hey, this is Gene Simmons.’ He just kept repeating it, and he just started laughing. Of course, we used it throughout the video. Anything with dollar signs or money, ‘Hey, this is Gene Simmons’ (laughs). It was different things like that, but yeah, we had a really good time.

“As far as us three coming together and getting in the groove, we all can’t wait to get started on Pantera Vol. 4 and Dimevision, Vol. 3. We’re ready to go; there’s footage that has been catalogued and put aside. I know that there’s so much that there’s no way that only Pantera Vol. 4 can come out, because it just won’t all fit in there. We’ll have to work some magic on that thing and maybe put out a few volumes of that, because they toured… Gosh, after home video Vol. 3 came out, it was just ‘Welcome to Pantera home video, Vol. 4’ from all of the kids with the double devil horns. That went on for three to four records, I think, and the live one. So, there’s a lot of footage. A lot of tours that will make it into Vol. 4, but there’s no way that all of it can fit (laughs). Hopefully that just means more for everybody. The way the digital age is, trying to get all of the clearances and stuff for all of this is pretty crazy. Hopefully the old school format people will come out and support. If it does well, then we’ll be able to put another one out.”

Dimevision, Vol. 3 might be shortly imminent, but a time period of 11 years separates the releases of volumes one and two. “We all had plans to make it a yearly thing, but gosh, I think a lot of it was grieving and just time getting away,” Rita ponders. “I know for me, it was just like ‘Boom, boom, boom.’ The next thing you know, three years had gone by. We started working on it, because I’ve got stuff that dates back all the way to 2007 and 2008 that we edited. Like I said though, time just got away. I know with Vinnie, he had started a band, and was trying to move on with the musical side of things. He’s gotten busy, and then Bobby was touring a lot between Manson and Slipknot. When my schedule permitted, his didn’t. He was on the road, and then we would be out on the road in the summertime with Dimebag Hardware and so on. And just yeah, the next thing you know, time just got away.

“Finally, things have slowed down. Everybody’s just gotten into that groove and agreed ‘Hey, let’s get this thing done,’ and it’s time. I think a lot of us have had time to, like I said, grieve. That’s a process that I don’t think ever stops. I know that it doesn’t for me, but you learn to work it into your daily routine I guess you would say.”

A difference in tone separates the respective pair of volumes. “With the first one, like I said, with what had just happened and what we were going through, it was more of a memorial piece,” Rita reasons. “I don’t think that was really our intention when it was coming together, but that’s just how it came together. I know that there are solos and things in there that were longer and things were more drawn out and at a slower pace, but at that time, I know it was the way we were feeling and the fans were feeling about that whole thing. What we did this time was to get back to that groove of moving it along and keeping it at a fast pace, like the Pantera home videos do. It’s got a lot of that kind of feel, to where we don’t want you to get bored. We want you to watch it a bunch of times to catch everything – stuff gets lost in there. And yeah, it tries to keep you uplifted. Really, where we were going was to get back to the basics of what a great Pantera home video should be. Even though it’s not Pantera, it’s Dimevision, he was still the creator of those videos. We have to follow that recipe, I guess you would say.”

‘Diamond’ Darrell Abbott in 1986

As well as being the creator of the video footage featured on Dimevision, Vol. 2, the late axeman was the creator of the five demo tracks which accompany its release. “I would say it was tough to pick through all of the tracks and decide which ones we wanted to get out there, because there’s a lot,” Rita divulges. “The five we narrowed it down to just for this first release though, I think people will dig. There’s a track on there, like I said earlier, called ‘True’. He did that track back in 1986. We included some descriptions and things. I think the regular DVD package comes with a 16-page booklet; it’s got a cool photo collage that doesn’t come in the deluxe package, which is a photobook and stuff.

“Fifty pages with unreleased photos and things like that are in there, but it gives you little descriptions and things that come from me, and from Sterling (Winfield) who was also on the road with them, who also engineered in the studio with them, and did several records. Sterling’s family was part of the crew. We took everybody’s memories and thoughts when it was all going down and being recorded, and this and that. Hopefully when people read it, they understand when they hear the music. Maybe it will settle them into that right vibe of what they’re about to get and that feeling of where he was at that time, so they can have fun with it.

“That’s pretty much what the music is, is for you to have fun with it, and to see a side of him that’s not that heavy. He does all of the singing, had a good old time with it, and wrote the lyrics. A lot of it is about things that he was going through at the time, and what was happening. The ‘True’ song has some terrible keyboards on it – it’s from 1986. It was influenced by George Michael.

“I used to work at this dance club and bartend, and he would come up. I remember coming home from work one night about 3am, and getting in. He had been working on it out in the garage, and just started talking about what the words meant and stuff. Yeah, it’s just such a wide range. There’s a lot of different things in there. I think people can… I don’t want to say learn life lessons or learn anything from, but there’s some pretty good lyrical content in some of these that makes good sense. Some of it I live by, and hopefully everybody else can get something out of it like I know I have.”

The vault, as it were, contains a multitude of material that was left behind. “Darrell’s first four-track I got for him for Christmas,” Rita tells. “I got him a Tascam; that was back in ’84, ’85, and he had made music since then. He even had a 16-track. As time progressed, he even had his own little road mini-studio that Bobby would haul up to his room for him and set up, so he had been making four tracks for a long time. You’re talking… Shit… There’d be almost 25 years of stuff there, so there is a ton of it. Like I said, some of it is just parodies of him writing different lyrics to other people’s songs, and it’s usually something about that person. It’s pretty funny, so hopefully we get to share some of that stuff too as far as working on getting clearances for it and so forth. Yeah though, it’s really hard to tell you a number. Honestly, I just know what it looks like, and there’s a lot of it.”

Should the inclination exist, one has to wonder if a fresh Pantera full-length could be fashioned out of pre-existing guitar parts Dimebag left behind. “I think we’re reaching there,” Rita feels. “Anything’s possible, but sticking all of that stuff together and ProTooling the hell out of it, it would just lose its authenticity. Its vibe. There was a piece that Darrell did on the piano that I actually sent to Philip (Anselmo, ex-Pantera vocalist), because I think he could write some really cool lyrics over it. There was another instrumental thing that I thought was pretty cool, and there’s still a few tracks that they had laid down that were going to be the next Damageplan record. That’s if it was going to be Damageplan, past all of the nonsense. Those tracks are still there.

“Me personally, I would love to see Philip and Rex (Brown, bass) play on those and have those come out as Pantera, just because I think they’d be so powerful. They’ll pop on, because I’ll forget that they’re in my library, in my iTunes. They’ll come on on shuffle out of nowhere, and I’m like ‘Oh shit, what is this?’ Then I remember, and go ‘Oh, damn. So powerful.’ There’s some music there, but who knows? It would be really cool, though. Like I said, I know Darrell will always be and always was Pantera in his heart. I would just love for that to be some of his final music, for that to be Pantera.”

Should a fresh Pantera full-length fashioned out of pre-existing guitar parts Dimebag left behind be a realistic possibility, one would assume the man’s brother Vinnie Paul would be against such a project. “I don’t know,” Rita muses. “Vinnie’s come a long way compared to when everything happened back in 2004. I don’t want to say you fall out a little bit I guess, but you have time to think about things. I’m not really sure, because I don’t live in his head. I know for me though, when you carry around something so hard and hurtful, it just tears you up inside. At a point, you do have to let go of things so you can breathe. Now, that doesn’t mean that you’ve gotta talk to anybody ever again, but I think as time goes by, things change. I would like to hope that that’s a possibility. Never say never (laughs).”

Had the fatal shooting not occurred on December 8th, 2004 at the Alrosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio, the four members of Pantera might have resolved their differences perhaps, and ventured on to create further records and tour yet again. “I think absolutely, the reason being Darrell was the most forgiving person that I knew,” Rita argues. “I know that myself included had all been in the hot seat with him one time or another over something. His father, me, Vinnie – like I said, anyone close to him. He was not one to just walk away or forget about something, even if he got angry. It ate at him until he got it figured out, confronted it, solved it. He was just that kind of guy, especially if you mattered to him. No matter how sideways shit got, which was lack of communication and people in the middle just not…

“Gosh, it’s easy to… What’s the saying?… Divide and conquer. And there were people that were dividing and conquering, and it should never have gotten like that. Like I said, it was lack of communication personally with them, and drugs. I can’t leave that part out, because drugs made them into different people. Yeah though, all of those factors, I think most definitely. I’ve seen Darrell forgive for some pretty horrendous things, and I know that he loved Philip and definitely loved…

“Like I said, he had spoken to Rex on his birthday. Rex was pretty tanked, and wanted to go out for steak dinner. We already had plans. Darrell was like ‘No, dude. I’m not going out with you today, tonight or tomorrow for steak dinner, but we have history. You used to live on my couch. My mom was your mom so we will talk, but just not today,’ and he meant that. I know he did. He wasn’t happy with his situation; with Patrick’s attitude (Patrick Lachman, Damageplan vocalist), and things that were going on with Damageplan. I have several voice messages from him saying ‘Dude, you’re not gonna believe what this dude is doing now. I just wanna fire him, but I don’t want people to think we’re difficult to work with.’ He was that bad to him already, and yeah, I think definitely they would’ve worked things out. They would’ve figured a way out, and they’d be jamming.”

The four members of the 1986-2003 incarnation of Pantera can never reunite of course, though Ozzy Osbourne and Black Label Society guitarist Zakk Wylde has been suggested multiple times to occupy the vacant position in the event of a potential Pantera reformation. Rita is aware of such suggestions. “I find it pretty comical (laughs), the only reason being is you could never call Pantera Pantera without any four of those members,” she stresses. “The magic just wouldn’t be there. They were brothers; they knew each other for a long time, and it just wouldn’t be right.

“I would love to see those guys jam onstage together and play some of the old tunes, and jam with the likes of Zakk, but you couldn’t just put that burden on one person. You’d have to bring in quite a few of his friends, like have Kerry King (Slayer) play a few songs, have Zakk Wylde play a few songs. You’d have to bring in some buddies, and make it healthier with a jam. You would be paying tribute and homage to a fallen brother, but those guys would never call that Pantera. They wouldn’t. I just know how they feel and thought about each other when it comes to that, which was a mutual respect.”

A farewell concert in the vein of what Rita outlined would be apt. “But you still wouldn’t call it Pantera,” she underlines. “You’d have Pantera in there, but you’d have to have a better way of wording because it just wouldn’t be right. I just don’t think any of them would feel right inside. If it was Pantera paying homage to a fallen brother, then maybe something like that. It wouldn’t be some touring band or whatever, though. Like I said, I’d love to see them jam together. Yeah, though. I just don’t know how hard that would be – to stand onstage without him – especially for Vinnie.”

Rita has individual relationships with each of Pantera’s former members, Vinnie Paul included. “Phil and I email,” she cites. “Rex and I get on the phone and talk; when you get on with Rex, it’s hard to get off (laughs). He’s as long-winded as me (laughs). Vinnie and I email. There for a while, he and I were estranged, and not really talking to each other or keeping up communication. People get in there, and divide and conquer. We’ve managed to overcome that, though. He’s trying to live his life and have his person, and I totally respect that. I understand that. I’m sure that when he looks at me, he thinks of his brother, and he doesn’t have him. I totally get it. Actually, I would say that this year has been a good year with all of us.”

Although Rita and Vinnie no longer remain estranged, him and vocalist Phil Anselmo still remain estranged. Rita hopes the former bandmates resolve their differences. “Gosh, I hope so,” she discloses. “I know what it is to carry something that hurtful inside of you, and just let it tear you down and not let you live. Hopefully somewhere, sometime, there can be some forgiveness some place. I know that there are still some things that I resent, some things that happened that were hurtful to Darrell that I couldn’t prevent. It’s like when you love somebody; you want to protect them, and you want to go to battle for them. When you see someone that hurt though, and it’s just out of your hands, you feel helpless. I know that there are things that made him feel that way, things that I will never see eye to eye with Philip or Rex on. I don’t know, though. You know those things about each other, and you figure out where you can continue to be family at.”

A book documenting the life and times of Dimebag and Pantera through Rita’s perspective seems like a viable proposition. “I’ve had a lot of people ask me that,” she chuckles. “I don’t know. I think it could be kind of fun. I know that there are a lot of things that I have; from postcards to letters to notes, to just little things that Darrell would mail me when he was on the road in Europe, and little packages. It’s stuff that I think would be fun to share with people, because they were always comical – little drawings, stick figures, and stuff. I think it would be fun for people to see that side of him, of how he was personally and in his heart too, that you might not see through the videos. I don’t know, though. You never know. Maybe I’ll find myself with nothing to do one day, and get on it (laughs).”

Bassist Rex Brown penned a book, the tome being titled Official Truth, 101 Proof. The book arrived in April 2013 via Da Capo Press. “Good lord…,” Rita says. “It’s not good to write a book when you don’t remember things, and you have other people telling you in your ear ‘This is how it went down’ when it didn’t. I got to chapter three, and I felt like I needed to get a highlighter out for things I knew were incorrect (laughs). I know where Rex is today, and where his head is. I know he regrets a lot of the things that are in that book. It’s kind of a… I don’t know. How can you write a book when there’s shit you don’t remember?”

‘Dimebag’ Darrell onstage with Damageplan in 2004

Official Truth, 101 Proof arguably seemed to paint Vinnie Paul in an unfavourable light, in particular. “It seemed potshot, like ‘Let’s try to take some potshots and stab at you,’” Rita critiques. “And yeah, it was pretty hateful. It’s the pot calling the kettle black. How can you throw stuff out there when you’re just as guilty or guilty of worse things? Some of the stuff is not yours to tell, or yours to judge. And yeah, it was pretty shitty, I would say. I know he has regrets about that. If he doesn’t, he needs to.”

Positive, negative, or otherwise, Official Truth, 101 Proof remains the only book to be penned by an individual belonging to Pantera’s inner circle. “Yeah…,” Rita agrees. “And, yeah. People think things that I know are fantasy about the guys, so I get you asking about a book. A book is a touchy thing. I would have no problem writing about mine and Darrell’s relationship, and we weren’t perfect. We had some pretty rough times a few times, but I also know in the end, the last few years of his life we were the happiest we ever were.

“I would not trade going through those mistakes because of where we wound up, and it took the horrible mistakes to get where we were. To tell someone else’s business is just not yours to tell though, unless it directly affects you, and they didn’t tell the truth or something. Yeah, then I can understand defending yourself. A book about this is a touchy thing to write, especially with all of the history all of us have together, without hurting somebody.”

For now, Pantera fanatics can placate themselves with the likes of Dimevision, Vol. 2, and the impending Dimevision, Vol. 3 and Pantera Vol. 4. “We were told that there’s no demand for DVDs any more, that even your biggest, hugest sellers can barely sell 5,000 copies,” Rita explains. “Nobody wanted to do this – even our own label passed (laughs). Luckily, a really good friend of ours – Brian Slagel (Metal Blade Records owner and CEO) – knows the potential and I would say the cult following that the Pantera home videos and Darrell has as far as in our home community of metal music. He knows absolutely what we’ve got to do, and he was there for us.

“Pretty much, this one is kind of laying the groundwork. If we prove the industry wrong, there’ll be more of them. If we don’t, and the kids don’t just go out and support the old school packaging, then yeah: most likely it’ll probably be something that goes away (laughs), which I hope doesn’t. Hopefully everyone gets out there, and shows how much they want it, and we can bring more. I would love to have more. Like I said, we’ve already started on Pantera 4, so it could easily be put out next year if we have the support of the fans and they want it. That’s what it boils down to, I guess.”

Dimevision, Vol. 2: Roll With It Or Get Rolled Over will be released on November 24th, 2017 via Metal Blade Records.

The brainchild of Frontiers Music Srl founder Serafino Perugino, the existence of melodic rock project Kee Of Hearts was disclosed on May 19th, 2017. Kee Of Hearts pairs former Europe guitarist Kee Marcello with Fair Warning vocalist Tommy Heart, hence its moniker. Efforts on a debut full-length studio album began in late 2016.

“That was his idea, to come up with a project where me and Tommy Heart of Fair Warning would do something together,” Kee continues. “I never had that thought in my head before he mentioned it, but once he got me started, I was thinking ‘That could really work.’ My melodic guitar playing and his amazing voice, I thought that that could really work, and it sure did. It was really effortless; it felt like we were meant to do this. Pretty easy, actually, like a walk in the park.”

Prior to the creation of Kee Of Hearts, the axeman and Tommy were not personally acquainted. “No, not at all,” he confirms. “Obviously, I had known of his work. I had always respected him as a singer, because he’s an amazing singer. We had never even met before this though, so it was a new friendship getting started, and a great new working relationship. We both love it. It’s great.”

Rounding out Kee Of Hearts’ line-up are keyboardist Alessandro Del Vecchio, drummer Marco Di Salvia, and bassist Ken Sandin. “Alessandrio Del Vecchio, he’s obviously been a house writer and producer for Frontiers for many years,” Kee references. “Then there’s Marco the drummer. I think me and Marco played on the same album, because I played on two albums with Pino Scotto who he normally plays with. I don’t know if you have heard of Pino Scotto, but he’s sort of the Italian Ozzy Osbourne if you will. He recently had his own TV show which aired three times a week, which is basically talking between rock videos. I played on two of Pino’s albums though, and Marco has been his drummer for the longest time. He was previously involved with Frontiers.

“I brought Ken Sandin into the mix. I had worked with Ken for so many years, since the turn of the millennium, so I really feel so much safer with Ken in the rhythm section. He can glue anything together; the riffs I make with Ken are a marriage made in heaven.”

The formation of a given assortment naturally leads to the adoption of a moniker, Kee Of Hearts borrowing its name from its two central personnel of course. “We got a fair bit of criticism about the name,” the axe-slinger reflects. “A lot of people think it’s lame, but the thing is that every time we were in the process of getting a name for the band, there were several different suggestions flying around. Somebody suggested Skylander, which doesn’t even start to make sense (laughs). There were a lot of names flying around, though. Finally, someone was talking about a deck of cards and the gambling process and all that, and at the same time it was something that could capture both of our brand names in one name. That’s where it came from, hence Kee Of Hearts.”

Kee Of Hearts is arguably a fitting moniker, representing the pairing of the two melodic rockers. “It’s very product descriptive,” Kee agrees. “It’s almost like Ikea furniture; you know immediately what it is from the name (laughs). It doesn’t make sense to you guys, but in Sweden, with all of the furniture in Ikea, the names actually mean what they are.”

Kee Marcello

Songwriting sessions for the resultant self-titled affair differed to past works to have included the performer’s involvement. “This project was kind of unusual for me, kind of a first experience, really,” he muses. “I haven’t written anything, really. Alessandro Del Vecchio wrote most of the music, but there are some outside writers. Tommy’s been writing some lyrics, but neither me or Tommy wanted to go into this as songwriters for one simple reason. Alessandro had so many strong songs to present to us, so when he came into the project, he had a lot of great songs on the table so to speak. We just started recording, because it felt like this was where we wanted to go. In the future of course, we wanted to be writing for the project also, but this first album was a very good opportunity to kick-start this new project – to have all of these great songs and this start to dig into it.”

When a songwriter harbours such a prolific nature as Alessandro, the danger of compositions being too musically similar can be an overriding concern. “Of course, that was a concern for us, but when I heard the songs, I could hear the end results,” Kee clarifies. “It’s also the mix of it all. I know what my guitars can add and so forth. I think it really sounds different from a lot of the other Frontiers productions, and that’s of course due to the fact that Tommy sings and I play. It’s always a risk when a producer gets a lot of gigs; it was pretty much the same thing back in the days when Bob Rock was producing every band, or Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange. They all had some of the same timbre, so there were the same sounding albums over and over again. It’s always a danger when somebody gets too successful.”

Although mostly authored by Alessandro et al, Kee and Tommy helped shape the resultant tracks. “I was on tour all of the time,” the musician remembers. “Tommy was more involved in the song process, so to speak. I was sent songs and had my opinions, and then when we agreed on a bunch, we went for it. Most of the stuff he sent I really liked, but it’s not only Alessandro – some of the songs were written by outside writers. It was actually a Swedish songwriting team who contributed a couple of songs, but the thing was from day one, we treated it like it was our badge so to speak. We were never step-parents to the songs on this album. We were parents from day one, so we just started working on them and tweaked them the way we liked. When I get demos for projects like this, I normally change stuff. When I put my guitars on, maybe I get an idea to change bass lines or other parts. It’s like an ongoing negotiation once you start recording, because sometimes I have really good ideas (laughs).”

The musical flavour generated by the collaboration is perhaps not what one would expect. “That’s kind of interesting,” Kee reckons. “I would’ve thought it was sort of like a mixture of Europe and Fair Warning and sometimes it does, but I get a bit of a Journey vibe as well. I guess that’s Alessandro, but it’s really cool. I like that kind of… It’s definitely AOR, but I like the way it came out. I’m happy that it didn’t come out like a perfect mix of Europe and Fair Warning, because that would’ve been pathetic. I think it leads a life of its own, so to speak.”

When the time arrives for the guitarist to pen material for the project, a musical deviation will likely not transpire. “I think it would probably sound in this vein,” he ponders. “To me, it came out like a proper style straight away; it feels like we have a musical style and a musical direction. I already have some ideas in the same vein, so it will be interesting to see how they sound.”

The lyrical fare complimenting the self-titled outing happens to be straightforward in nature. “It’s actually very straight from the heart type of lyrics, like person to person relations, which I think is the only way of doing it with this kind of music,” Kee analyses. “You can’t go Franz Kafka on people’s asses with this kind of melodic music – it’s got to be relatable. For example, ‘Twist Of Fate’ is a classic theme for a song. We’re all struck by fate once in a while, whatever fate is. Nobody knows. Sometimes it’s luck, but sometimes it’s bad luck. Something happens maybe for a reason, or maybe not for a reason. That’s a really interesting topic for a song, I think. That worked out great there. My favourite ‘Mama Don’t Cry’ is really interesting; it’s got this sort of very sort of bittersweet verse, with interesting things going on there, and then it runs into a rather positive, major chorus. I like the contrast. It shouldn’t work, but it really works for some reason. That’s a great song.”

As is the case with many international projects, each member largely cut their parts separately. “Like so often nowadays, you get to do it in your own studio,” the axeman discloses. “Even though me and Ken live in the same city, we didn’t do the stuff together, mainly because I’m so busy. Ken did come over here; we had one-hour meetings twice just to go through all of the stuff. He recorded most of the bass in his own studio, in his house, and I recorded in my studio. I’ve got two studios; one about a seven-minute car ride from where I live, and a line studio in the house. Between the two of those, I recorded all of my guitars. Sometimes when I really want to blast out those Marshalls, I can’t do it in the house out of respect for the neighbours (laughs), so I go to the soundproofed studio I’ve got.

“Alessandro sent demos, and it was Tommy’s scratch vocals and a demo guitar. What I always do when I get material is I listen to the songs, I learn the passages, and then I just take away everything except drums, bass, and vocals and go from there. It’s a building process; rock ’n’ roll is built upon riffs, not chords. It’s got to make sense, because there are lines working together, and you have to build everything from the riffs. Then I bring in the keyboards, backgrounds. I work that way, just to see where it needs beefing up. Then it’s really easy for me to make the arrangements.”

Guitar parts laid down for demo purposes tend to be quite basic. “99.9% of all demo guitars are pure shit,” Kee laments. “It’s the diametrical opposite to my guitar playing, just playing those basic chords, and I hate it so much. It always makes me sick. I take them away, so they can be organic, pumping riffs, and cool grooves and stuff happening. I hate demo guitars, even my own, but I rarely do them. I try to capture a riff already in the songwriting phase.”

A musician wouldn’t be so inclined to add their own individual should the demo guitar parts happen to be up to standard. “Right, exactly,” the axe-slinger concurs. “That helps doing it. Respectfully, sometimes somebody has a great idea, and then you have to reproduce that idea and do it as good as you can. Normally though, when you’re talking about songwriters, they don’t worry so much about guitar arrangements. They don’t need you to hear the whole picture, so that’s how I work. Often, there are examples of the opposite as well (laughs).

“I remember I played on Eric Carr’s posthumous release a couple of years ago (Unfinished Business, November 2011); somebody collected all of his demos and stuff and then released a posthumous album, and I played on one of the songs. It was a couple of years ago, but I remember I did some really inspired guitar riffs on that song – a signature Kee Marcello solo, so to speak. I was really happy with it, and the verses included acoustic guitars, which really worked as well. Then some years passed, and they released this album. When I got it, I got it from Eric Carr’s sister, actually. I put it on the stereo if you will, and they only kept the acoustic guitars (laughs). That was just horrible, because I hated the rhythms and I hated the solo on there. I still had to live with my guitars being on the same track, and that was agony to me.

“One part of me wanted to say ‘Come on, Kee. You’re doing this for Eric.’ I met Eric when he was in really bad shape, before he passed away and all that. Of course, I wanted to do that for him and his family, but at the same time, I couldn’t let go of the thought that these motherfuckers took away my guitar riffs and my solo, and traded it for pure shit. I did do a demo with my guitars, but I don’t think I have it any more. It would have been interesting to compare. The song was called ‘The Elephant Man’, and that’s exactly how I think it turned out; as beautiful as the Elephant Man (laughs).”

Cover artwork responsibilities were handled by Anders Fästader. “Anders Fästader is really good,” Kee enthuses. “His name is Anders Fästader, but everybody calls him Nippe. He’s a really good designer; he actually did Scaling Up for me (October 2016), and actually several different covers for me through the years. The thing is, me and Anders both love Hipgnosis, a designing team who did all of the cool album covers in the 70s and 80s. They did Peter Gabriel, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd. They were just the best, and we’re fans of them. They always had double and triple meanings behind their covers.

“What happened was, with Kee Of Hearts, the obvious relation was playing cards, a casino, and all that. He’s added a roulette wheel obviously, and he’s throwing these playing cards. You can see he’s got a little brooch on his jacket and that’s like the Illuminati and the all-seeing eye, so he’s covering one of his eyes. There’s all stuff like that going on – you know, the Illuminati, like the Freemasons. You don’t want to make it too obvious, of course. The vinyl is really cool, because when you open it up and take out the inner sleeve, you can actually see the guy’s face. It’s kind of like a scary eye. It’s very influenced by Hipgnosis; they did some really cool covers with Peter Gabriel, as well, the 70s Peter Gabriel stuff.”

Music videos filmed to promote the jaunt were recorded in Italy. “We shot them while I was in Italy, performing at the Frontiers festival with the Kee Marcello band,” the entertainer tells. “It was in March. Me and Ken stayed for an extra couple of days, and so we recorded those two videos in a recording studio. One was basically done in a white room, which I think really works in the context of the video. ‘The Storm’, you have nothing except the band – just white. I like that kind of look. I think the guys did a good job on this one.”

Kee met Tommy for the first occasion shortly prior to the aforementioned clips being filmed. “I met him a couple of days earlier,” he discloses. “That would have been awkward, because doing a rock video is almost like making out (laughs). It would be like meeting someone for the first time. No, we were hanging for several days before that. He was there for the same reasons, so we were just talking about music, hanging, and all that. I think it’s impossible to just walk into a room and try to shoot a video with somebody you haven’t met previously.”

Kee Of Hearts (l-r): Kee Marcello and Tommy Heart

Having cut an entire full-length prior to a face-to-face conversation, one potential concern might’ve been actually developing a dislike for his new musical sparring partner. “That would be a nightmare, wouldn’t it?,” the musician laughs. “The funny thing is, I’ve done a lot of different projects, and most people are friendly. If you want to engage in a project and submit to do something like that, you’ve gotta be willing to play the game so to speak. You wouldn’t see Yngwie part of a project like this (laughs). You couldn’t afford a hangar big enough for his head, so that would be impossible.”

Such comments suggest Kee isn’t a fan of Yngwie. “He is who he is,” he reasons. “I know him, so maybe that’s worse (laughs). I know how he is.”

The guitarist’s reply strengthens that notion. “We are friends, in a funny way,” he shares. “He is what he is. He is an asshole, but he’s kind of a funny asshole. There are different kinds of assholes, I think. Funny assholes have a pass (laughs). I think they can make themselves funny in the right situations.”

Further videos may be in the pipeline. “I’m quite sure there will be,” Kee feels. “I haven’t talked to the label, but I’m voting for ‘Mama Don’t Cry’. I think that could be a really cool video, so I’m hoping for that. There are definitely gonna be more videos. I decided that right now, that there are gonna be more videos (laughs).”

Perhaps it would be best to liaise with Serafino prior to spending his cash, it is jested. “If he doesn’t want to spend his money, I’ll fucking pay for them,” the axeman chuckles. “We need a video for ‘Mama Don’t Cry’, because it’s such a good song. I believe it’s actually a hit; it could be a big hit, and I’m not alone. A friend of mine, a manager guy, he feels the same way. He listens to it like ten times a day, and he’s convinced that this is going somewhere. So yeah, I’ve got to act on that notion, definitely. The good thing with this project is that it is actually selling pretty good in territories we expected, like south-east Asia. Both Europe and Fair Warning were huge in Japan and South America, but in America as well, so we’re going forward. Pretty cool.”

Kee Of Hearts may potentially become a touring concern. “I think there’s a pretty good chance of it probably becoming a touring band,” Kee judges. “That’s the plan, anyway. We just signed a trial contract, if you will, with management to see where we can go with this, because we have a good feeling about it. We have a good feeling about the material and the band itself, and what we can make happen with it in the future, so we’ll give it a shot. We’re already planning to do some festivals in 2018. Nothing is booked so far, but we’re working on different scenarios. As you probably know, both me and Tommy are super-busy as well. First of all, we have to try to find a place in our calendars to do this, but I’m thinking we can do some festivals in the summer and possibly some gigs.”

And as well, a second full-length is likely. “I spoke to Tommy about that,” the axe-slinger informs. “We said about getting ready for recording a second record pretty fast. Why not, while we’re going and things are going pretty well? So, the start of 2018. Until then, both me and Tommy are super-busy. I think I’ve got every date covered until Christmas, but yeah, 2018… That’s the next time I’m free. We’re gonna get together and start planning it, and possibly have it ready for the autumn of 2018.”

Solo-wise, Kee is in the process of crafting a follow-up to October 2016 outing Scaling Up. “Oh, definitely,” he states. “I’m actually writing songs for that right now, but I don’t know when we’re gonna be able to record it. I have to speak to the record company about that, and that’s the thing. My solo career and Kee Of Hearts are both on the same label, so we need to have a meeting about that. I think I might come down to Naples and speak to Serafino and Mario about how to make this not collide, because we need to do both things in parallel so to speak. Definitely though, I’m in the writing process right now. I’ve got at least three or four songs. I’ve got two demos already, so it’s taking shape.

“It’s going to be a follow-up to Scaling Up, and in the same vein. Songwriting wise, I would describe it as sort of 70s-80s riff-influenced music, which is pretty much just what I’ve always done. If you think about it, I grew up in the 70s listening to all of these bands, and then I started my career in the 80s for real. That’s when I produced some of the bigger stuff, so that’s what it sounds like. I do riffs that make you think about the 70s, but they sound more like from an 80s guy in the now because the sound is different, and the guitar tone is different from what it was back then. I would guess melodic, 70s-80s music, but now. That’s what I think it is (laughs).”

Kee Of Hearts was released on September 15th, 2017 via Frontiers Music Srl.

Interview published in October 2017. All promotional photographs by Johnny Pixel.

On December 19th, 2013, Las Vegas, Nevada-based hard rock group Sin City Sinners convened at local venue Count’s Vamp’d. Sin City Sinner’s line-up that evening consisted of Brent Muscat (guitars, ex-Faster Pussycat), Scotty Griffin (bass), Rob Cournoyer (drums), and Michael T. Ross (keyboards, ex-Hardline). Rounding out the line-up solely that evening happened to be vocalist Phil Lewis and guitarist Tracii Guns, then former longtime bandmates within Los Angeles, California-based hard rock outfit L.A. Guns. The concert marked the first occasion in a number of years the pair had performed alongside one another.

“It was around Christmas time of 2013,” Phil Lewis remembers. “A charity event takes place in Las Vegas every year called Toys For Tots, and it’s to raise money for underprivileged kids. It’s toys for Christmas – you get in for free if you bring an unopened toy. You can donate. All of the money goes to this charity, and Tracii signed up to do it – for nothing, of course. The event organiser gave me a call, and said ‘Look, Tracii’s doing this. Would you be interested in getting up and doing a few songs?’

“Just the nature of the event seemed like a nice thing, a good thing to do. We got together, and we didn’t rehearse. We didn’t even soundcheck – I just showed up an hour or so before. I played; it was just four songs, and we just got on great. We got on like a house on fire. We hadn’t seen each other at all in over a decade, not even by accident. We hadn’t run into each other in a club, or a music store, or anywhere. It was very nice, great, just talking with him briefly. When we played, I got the vibe of course. There’s that magic that we have when we play together, and that was the beginning of The Missing Peace.”

October 2017 outing The Missing Peace – L.A. Guns’ 11th full-length studio affair – unites the pair, two incarnations of L.A. Guns having existed between 2006 and 2012. “It was a terrible time for the band,” the frontman views. “It’s definitely our lowest point. As many as 47 – and it might be up to 50 now… I don’t know – people out there lay claim to having been a member of L.A. Guns, and if that’s not Spinal Tap then I don’t know what is. None of that matters, though. Me and him are back together back working, and all of that other stuff is history.”

Tracii Guns had exited the fold in October 2002, two months following the release of eighth studio LP Waking The Dead. “Tracii was a little disillusioned with the band, and he had a side project with Nikki Sixx – Brides Of Destruction,” Phil recalls. “He was just fed up, and said ‘Look, I’m gonna concentrate a 100% on Brides, and you guys sort yourselves out. Make wise decisions.’ As I just said, we had recorded and released Waking The Dead. It was up to me and Steve Riley, like ‘Are we gonna quit, or are we gonna go out and find another guitar player and promote this great record we had just produced?’ That’s exactly what we did.”

Phil Lewis’ respective incarnation of L.A. Guns, featuring Steve Riley behind the drumkit, performed its last concert on December 31st, 2016. “I’ve got nothing bad to say about Steve Riley,” the singer ponders. “We’ve done hundreds of shows together, great shows. We’ve recorded many albums; the three albums that we recorded together without Tracii we’re incredibly proud of. It was just that after we had released Hollywood Forever (June 2012), one year, two years, three or four years went by, and I wanted to record another album. He wasn’t very keen on it; I couldn’t get him enthusiastic about going back into the studio, and it was like… I like recording, I like writing… I mean, I like the gigging and everything, and touring as well, but I got really frustrated. He was dragging his feet on recording, even before this reunion came about.

Tracii Guns and Phil Lewis

“I had given my notice in with Steve, saying in October 2015 that I was gonna be leaving on December 1st, 2016 after the New Years Eve show at the Whisky, which is exactly what I did. It wasn’t to jump from one thing onto another, though. As far as I was concerned, I was just gonna go out and put a solo band together, or even just go out and play solo acoustic. I was pretty much done, though, playing with the usual suspects and doing the same old circuit. I was a bit bored, so with this reunion thing, the timing couldn’t have been better.”

Reuniting, the duo recruited several musicians to round out L.A. Guns’ line-up. “Tracii had been working with Shane Fitzgibbon, the drummer,” Phil divulges. “He had Johnny Martin on bass. When I did that charity gig with him, I was really impressed with both of those guys when they played and their attitude, so there was no reason to change anything there. We needed a second guitar player and I suggested Michael, who had been playing with me in my version for almost three years. Tracii was delighted with that suggestion, and it has all fallen nicely into place.”

The lyricist describes songwriting sessions in aid of The Missing Peace as being ‘a group effort’. “Everybody’s contributed to the writing and lyrics, and brought in songs,” he credits. “It’s not just me and Tracii. We didn’t say ‘Okay, we’re gonna write this record.’ For example, Shane the drummer wrote the lyrics for ‘Christine’, Johnny Martin wrote ‘Baby Gotta Fever’, and Michael Grant brought in ‘The Devil Made Me Do It’ and ‘Don’t Bring A Knife To A Gunfight’. They’re songs that everyone contributed, but when we got together and played them, they became very typical L.A. Guns.”

Having listened to The Missing Peace’s 12 musical offerings, certain fans and critics have arrived at a specific conclusion. “When we started recording, we didn’t wanna make a nostalgic record, but a lot of people have said that it sounds like it could’ve been released after Cocked & Loaded (August 1989),” Phil tells. “It’s just something I’ve heard from fans and from journalists, and alike. It does have that vibe; even though we didn’t set out to do something like Cocked & Loaded, it just has that vibe. I don’t know if it sounds like it that.

“Songs like ‘Fever’ and ‘Speed’ do sound like they could have been on Cocked & Loaded, but musical pieces like ‘Gave It All Away’ and ‘The Missing Peace’ are musically way beyond anything we would’ve done back then, so it’s like we’ve evolved. I mean, ‘Speed’ and ‘Fever’ could be on Cocked & Loaded, but ‘The Missing Peace’ and ‘Gave It All Away’? There’s no way, so it’s quite a wide spectrum on this one. Wider than perhaps we’ve ever done in the past. We’ve gotten better, and with better musicians. We’re better people. It’s like a fine wine, and it really shows on this record.”

Had a reunion between the vocalist and Tracii not taken place, Tracii’s musical ideas may have taken on a different shape. “Before there was even the reunion, Tracii already had had the deal with the label, with Frontiers,” the vocalist notes. “He was about to embark on a solo record, but once I heard a couple of his ideas… Once he played the ideas that he had for his solo record, I was like ‘Oh, yeah. I’ve gotta be a part of this. I really like this a lot.’ We started off on a couple of songs, and before I knew it, me and him were immersed in making a new record together.”

The lyrical fare included on The Missing Peace is largely self-explanatory. “They’re not really about anything,” Phil judges. “I mean, I can tell you that the lyrics on ‘Christine’ are about me and Tracii (laughs), which I didn’t know. I found out fairly recently, because as I said, Shane wrote them. I thought that he was writing about his grandparents, his uncle, or something like that. It was about this old couple that had been together, and were really understanding of each other. I thought that it was a love song, and I only found out recently that the cheeky bugger was writing about me and Tracii (laughs), which I think is charming. I’m really happy about that, but the lyrics…. ‘Don’t Bring A Knife To A Gunpoint’ is self-explanatory, and ‘The Devil Made Me Do It’. I don’t really like to go into deep meanings, because I like people to come to their own conclusions of what the songs are about.”

The Missing Peace

Recording sessions for The Missing Peace began in a modest fashion. “We did pre-production in a rehearsal room, in a basement, just locked away without amps,” the entertainer begins. “We worked in like a sweatbox, and went through the music over and over. I was tweaking lyrics. When we came to record it, we did the drums in a big, old school recording studio, which you’re supposed to do for drums. Mostly all of the guitars Tracii did at his house, in his garage – his home studio. I did a lot of the vocals with Mitch Davis in his studio in New York, in Pull Studios, over a four-day period. It was recorded very quickly; once we decided on the songs, we pretty much had the album done in about eight weeks. As a fun fact, the record cost less to make than our catering budget on Hollywood Vampires (June 1991). I don’t know how much it cost exactly, but it’s just a funny observation. The catering budget back then would’ve been $20-25,000, easy (laughs).”

Phil has supplied vocals to a number of full-lengths across four decades, beginning with Girl’s January 1980 debut Sheer Greed, and continuing to do so 37 years later. “I like to think that my singing has evolved,” he observes. “They say that whatever you focus on, after about 5-10,000 years, you should become an expert in whatever it is. I have certainly put my hours in as far as singing goes. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I’ve definitely developed. My range is better, and I’m stronger. In the early Girl days, I pretty much just shouted. I take care of my voice; I do warm-ups before a show. I make sure that I keep my trap shut after a show, especially if I’ve got a bunch of consecutive gigs. I have to; if I don’t have a voice, then we can’t play. Then we don’t make money and I become the bad guy, so I’m very disciplined on the road, which has consequently made me a better artist I think.”

Vocally, the frontman likes to push himself to an extent. “I like doing stuff that is a challenge, but I don’t want to set the bar too high because I’m gonna have to do it live,” he clarifies. “Now I’m gonna have to sing maybe four or five nights a week, so I’ve got to bear that in mind when I record that it has to sound the same, and not be in a different key, or me singing it an octave lower. So, yes to both of those. I do like to push myself, but not so much that I’m not gonna be able to pull it off every night.”

Among the tracks Phil lent vocals to in aid of the full-length is the title cut itself. “You’d have to explain the spelling of the word ‘peace’ in The Missing Peace,” he offers. “It’s not like a piece; it’s just a double entendre on me and Tracii’s relationship. We have both been fine playing without each other and doing alright, but there was always something missing – for me, anyway. When we play, I feel that there’s a certain completeness that we have. It was missing and we missed it, and it’s an absolutely perfect title for the record.”

Besides the title composition and a further 11 fellow tunes, three additional tracks were recorded. “I think we recorded about 15 songs,” the singer estimates. “We tried to make it as interesting a record as possible and not make it too same-y, so we’ve still got a few in the can that we could probably put out down the line. We just wanted the best songs that we had, but there’s nothing wrong with the ones that we didn’t put on. We just didn’t need what they were, because the 12 songs that we picked are perfect. Sometimes if you make an album too long, it puts people off. It just gets a bit tiresome. The running order is important, and the length of the record is important. It just seemed like exactly the right amount for us to do. The few in the can are all done though, and good to go. We’ve started work on new ones, as well. We’re not short of stuff.”

Leading the charge with fresh material as it were is Tracii. “Tracii is a consummate guitar player,” Phil compliments. “He plays guitar on the road, and the first thing he does when he gets home is play guitar. He’s just one of these guys; it’s like an extension of his body, and he’s just always sitting there playing riffs and coming up with ideas. Then it’s up to me to interpret his ideas into a verse or a chorus, or middle sections. It’s a lot of fun, because he’s always got something interesting up his sleeve.”

A follow-up to The Missing Peace will likely arrive during 2019 or so. “That’s what we’re looking at,” the wordsmith confirms.

Phil Lewis and Tracii Guns

The prospect of a solo jaunt has been placed on the back-burner. “I’m not thinking about that at the moment, because I’m so immersed in this,” Phil explains. “Eventually I’d like to do a solo record, but at the moment, the schedule on this is insane. There’s just absolutely no time for me to think about doing a solo record for at least another 18 months.”

Such comments suggest that L.A. Guns will be a full-time proposition for the vocalist. “Balls to the wall,” he enthuses.

Returning to the topic of The Missing Peace, an official lyric video was created for the track ‘The Flood’s The Fault Of The Rain’ in an effort to aid its promotion. “We did a live performance video for ‘Speed’, and that was fun,” the performer reckons. “We’re not actors; I don’t particularly want to dress up and act for the video. The song is a little bit on the sad side, so it was best covered graphically using animation. They did a good job. It’s something we’ve never done before. It didn’t cost that much to make, and they did it very quickly. We thought we’d have a go at a lyric video, and see how we fared. It turned out great.”

Further videos will likely be issued to promote The Missing Peace. “I reckon we’ll probably do one for ‘Fever’, and maybe even one for ‘The Devil Made Me Do It’,” Phil muses. “It depends on how much this thing snowballs. Right now, it’s through the roof. Amazon have sold out, Best Buy sold out. Some record outlets are completely sold out. Classic Rock voted it as one of the best albums of 2017, and Rolling Stone voted us the top five new albums to stream this month, so we’re getting a lot of attention. We haven’t had too many thumbs down from people, fortunately. So yeah, we’re doing something right. We’ll probably end up doing at least one more video from the record, maybe more.”

Designing the cover artwork for The Missing Peace, wife of the frontman. “She’s an amazing artist; her and I have collaborated on a lot of stuff,” he raves. “If you look at the video off of the record Hollywood Forever, she’s the sexy black widow in ‘Araña Negra’. She’s as clever as she is cute. She was Tracii’s first choice to do the cover for the record, and that was great – having it in the family. I think she did a bloody good job.”

The Missing Peace was released on October 13th, 2017 via Frontiers Music Srl.

Interview published in October 2017. All promotional photographs by Dustin Jack.

July 2017 affair The Forest Seasons – the third full-length studio album from Helsinki, Finland-based epic metal outfit Wintersun – wasn’t originally planned. The composition ‘The Forest That Weeps’ was penned by mainman Jari Mäenpää as a bonus track for a round of crowdfunding Wintersun had launched, but said track would spawn the authorship of further, related tunes. “Jari got so inspired by that first track that he was working on – ‘The Forest That Weeps’, the summer song of the album – that he started writing more riffs and songs in a similar style,” remembers Teemu Mäntysaari, guitarist of Wintersun. “Then he kind of realised ‘Okay, these songs would fit together,’ and then the forest theme kind of came about like that as well.

“The recording process itself was pretty raw you could say, though. We didn’t use any third-party studios. This time, the original idea was to make music and make an album that we could do with our current resources, meaning not as big a production as the Time albums for example, and a more raw and more primitive production. So, that was influencing how the music was starting to sound as well. Basically, the whole production was done in Jari’s small apartment flat; pretty much everything from the guitars and bass and programming and so forth, except for the vocals which Jari did at my work’s place – at Sonic Pump Studios.

“I have a work room there where I teach and do recording stuff, so he used my room during night times. He went there and sang during the night time when there was nobody else around. Also, we did these choir sessions at Sonic Pump Studios. That was kind of a special thing for this album as well. Like we did already on Time I (October 2012), we gathered a group of friends and people from bands that we know, and asked them to come to Sonic Pump Studios and record some choir vocals for ‘The Forest That Weeps’. That was a pretty cool experience.

“The recording process was really different than what bands usually do, though. They go into the studio, and then they record the album, and then they mix it and they master it. This time what we did was actually production-wise kind of backwards, because even before Jari started working on the first song, he kind of had this sound idea in his head. He wanted to create certain types of sounds, and so he actually prepared all of the guitar sounds and all of the samples in his Cubase Pro, even before writing the song. He kind of had the mix already there with the sounds before there was an actual song, and then with those sounds that he had imagined in his head, he started creating the songs. It was bit of a backward process, in that way. The album was actually kind of mixed before it was recorded. The sounds were made first, and then the songs.”

The writing of ‘The Forest That Weeps’ dates back to early 2015. “I think it started somewhere in early 2015 because by the 2015 tour, we were already playing that song,” the axeman notes. “It was not totally finished yet, but we were already playing that as a teaser on the 2015 tour.”

The Forest Seasons consists of four compositions encompassing the four seasons. “Each song has a different feel, relating to the season theme of course,” Teemu opines. “‘The Forest That Weeps’, that’s the summer song, but maybe it’s not the kind of image of summer that maybe at first comes to mind. It still has kind of summer vibes and some bold melodies though, and kind of the majestic feel of summer maybe more than the going on the beach kind of summer.

“‘Eternal Darkness’ is the autumn track, and is probably the darkest track that Jari has ever written. It has a lot of these black metal types of influences, while being black metal and still being pretty melodic at times. The chorus in that one is pretty interesting, because it’s partly written from death’s perspective – how death sees life. It’s a really dark track both lyrically and musically, and also, I think it has really cool, melodic moments. It’s really crazy, and has a Wintersun-style guitar solo as well.

“Then ‘Loneliness’, the winter track, is kind of opposite to ‘Eternal Darkness’. It’s one of the most beautiful and kind of calm tracks that Jari has written, with mostly clean vocals. And yeah, it’s kind of describing this feeling of being in this place between when you’re dying but you’re not dead yet, and walking through endless snow fields. It’s kind of an empty, lonely feeling, but also at the same time a very beautiful and kind of melancholic feeling.

“Then we have ‘Awaken From The Dark Slumber’ for the spring track, which starts with nature and the forest being in sleep. That has a kind of early spring feel, and still sleeping after the winter. The first part of the song is kind of dark, the awakening part. Then it goes to this majestic spring feel full of energy, which is very kind of powerful and melodic. The majestic feel is maybe a reminder of some of the older stuff that Jari has done on the first Wintersun album.”

Such comments suggest The Forest Seasons is dark in lyrical subject matter. “It has some dark vibes to it, but not only dark,” the axe-slinger describes. “There are many metaphors as well with the forest and nature, so it’s a kind of down to earth type of album. Not so big maybe as the Time lyrics about space and the universe and all this. Of course it has some universal stuff as well, but this is a more kind of down to earth type of feel I would say. Some of the lyrics are more personal to Jari than ever before. I think he’s developed a lot as a lyricist and is able to bore deeper within himself, like about his feelings. For example, there’s ‘Eternal Darkness’, talking a lot about death; I think they were lyrics influenced by his father’s death, who also died during the autumn time. So, they are very personal lyrics.”

The Forest Seasons is perhaps Wintersun’s most varied album to date. “I would probably say so,” Teemu muses. “The first album was kind of maybe bit of a continuation from the Ensiferum times and still had some of that Ensiferum feel, but was still taking it to a different level with different styles and adding different things like synths. Then Time I kind of made it more epic and bigger with the orchestrations, and now this one kind of maybe goes between the two. This one has orchestrations and cool synth tracks, but not as big a production as the Time albums. Still the riffs are partly like the riffs off of the first album – simple and catchy guitar riffs – and then partly also the more kind of progressive stuff that we started more on the Time I album. So, I would say that this one is the most varied album.”

The gaps between Wintersun studio outings are arguably great in length, five years separating Time I and The Forest Seasons, for example. “We’ve had pretty length periods, now,” the performer admits. “The first album came out in 2004, and the Time album had been in the works for a long time. Time I came out in 2012, and then we are still working on Time II and have been for a while before putting it on the shelf and starting work on this latest album. There have been a lot of things happening; we’ve been touring in-between, and of course Jari writes music all the time.

“It kind of keeps evolving I think naturally all the time, depending on whatever gets you inspired in life. Jari has this kind of thought that he doesn’t want to do the same thing all over again though, so even if he could write multiple albums of the same kind of stuff, he’s got so many different kinds of visions of what he wants to do with music. He’s so creative with different kinds of stuff that he also likes to challenge himself that every album is a bit different in concept, and maybe also musically. He’s always trying to search for new ideas rather than just repeating similar types of ideas.”

Various factors determine the length between Wintersun albums. “With Time I, we started the recording process in 2006,” Teemu notes. “When the first album came out in 2004, then it took a bit of time to get the band together. The first album was just Jari and Kai (Hahto) on drums, and then they recruited Jukka (Koskinen) on bass and me on the guitar. Then we started playing live shows in 2005, and then there was some touring and festivals before we even started thinking about the Time albums. Then in 2006 we recorded a lot of the basic tracks for Time I, and then there were a lot of difficulties with the production. Now thinking back about it, I think that was also our own fault in a way. We thought that we could make it with the resources that we had. Jari had this huge vision for the Time albums; he wanted to make these big orchestrations and all of that stuff, but he didn’t really have the computer power at the time.

“We’re talking about 2006, 2007. Trying to mix hundreds of tracks at that time wasn’t easy, and still isn’t that easy. There was also a lot of stuff that Jari had to learn by himself because he had the vision, but wasn’t always sure how to make it work with the equipment that he had. He had to learn how to orchestrate and those kinds of things, and how to make the sounds that he heard in his head a reality, so that was also one reason why the Time albums took longer than they were originally planned. So yeah, I think there was also a lot of bad luck along the way as well like computers crashing, hard discs crashing, and all that. The bigger the projects got, it was maybe harder to let go.

“Then finally in 2011, 2012 when we decided that ‘Okay, the Time albums are going to be split into two,’ with Time I and Time II, then Jari had to make this compromise that ‘Okay, we have to let go of Time I. Then we will get back on the road, and finish Time II as soon as possible.’ When that was released in 2012 though, then we had to do some touring. It took a bit of time to kind of do the touring again, and get back to the production of Time II. When we got there, then it took Jari a while to realise that he still couldn’t complete the vision with the resources that he had, even though the computers had been getting much better. Still though, this time he wasn’t ready to compromise on the vision like he kind of did with Time I.

“That’s why we started thinking about maybe doing something else in-between before releasing Time II, and then came this idea for crowdfunding and trying to get better production possibilities for the band for future albums. That’s how the idea of The Forest Seasons album was borne, but then of course time passed between those moments. The main thing why The Forest Seasons has taken so long is planning the crowdfunding. That took a while. Also, because we wanted to do it ourselves, we had to learn a lot of things along the way about photography, making videos and of course composing the stuff. That’s why it took about three years from the point where we decided ‘Okay, we’re gonna do crowdfunding’ and then succeeded with the crowdfunding, and finally having the album out.”

The musician wasn’t responsible for all of The Forest Seasons’ guitar parts. “This album is almost all of Jari’s guitar work,” he credits. “He’s basically responsible for 99.9% of all Wintersun stuff. Where I did my parts was mostly with the acoustic arrangements, and recording acoustic guitars with Jari for the acoustic version of ‘Loneliness’.”

Different artists designed cover artworks for The Forest Seasons and The Forest Package, respectively. “We had a couple of different guys in mind,” Teemu shares. “In the end though, we ended up with this Hungarian guy called Gyula Havancsák, who I think did a great job. He worked on the cover with Jari; Jari had a pretty clear vision of what he wanted, and then we went back and forth with different versions. Finally, I think we got a really good cover for the album. Then we also had another artist who did the Time I cover as well – Cameron Gray from Australia – who this time did the cover for The Forest Package that we were having for sale on the crowdfunding. So, basically two different covers with similar types of ideas. The Forest Seasons of course represents the album, and The Forest Package represents more of the whole thing with all of the extras that came with The Forest Package.”

The addition of Asim Searah as a second guitarist for live purposes was revealed on April 13th, 2017. “Originally the idea came from Jari, that he wanted to step aside from playing guitar live to be able to concentrate more on vocals live,” the axeman reasons. “He felt that it was always a bit of a compromise for him to play and sing at the same time. He always loved to play separately and sing separately, but when combining the two, he felt like he could only give 50% to playing and 50% to vocals. He wanted to then get another guitar player for live shows, so we decided to do this open audition kind of thing.

“We announced on Facebook that we were looking for a second guitarist, and we then decided on parts from different songs which showed different techniques that we wanted people to record on video and send their audition tapes to us. Some people put their auditions on YouTube, and some people just sent them straight to us. Asim was actually the first one who sent all the clips required; I think he came with all of the clips in like a week or two weeks, whereas he had four weeks time in total. A lot of the applicants actually sent their material on the last day or so.

“We got altogether like… I think it was maybe 50 guys, so quite many videos and some really good players. We were mainly looking for a guy from Finland, or somewhere near. Yeah, there were a lot of people from different countries and some really great players as well, but we wanted somebody who was close by just for logistic reasons. It’s easier that way. I think we kind of knew Asim from a while back; I’ve personally known him for ten years or so, and everybody in the band has seen him around. Not everybody in the band knew about his playing so much, because he’s been more prolific in being a great vocalist in multiple bands. But yeah, we were kind of surprised at how well he played on the audition tapes.

“Yeah, we were going back and forth. We had ten; we chose a few guys who we then invited for a live audition at Sonic Pump Studios to play; to basically just come meet us, and show us their playing. Then in the end, we had a couple of guys who we gave at least one full song without guitars and a deadline to learn it, and then coming back to Sonic Pump Studios and recording it live – like a live audition. Asim pretty much nailed it, and we were really happy to have him onboard.”

A perennial question on the lips of Wintersun fanatics is as to the status of Time II. “At the moment, Time II is on the shelf until we can really get the facilities and possibilities to complete the production as it’s envisioned, but that’s the whole purpose of this crowdfunding – to be able to do not only Time II, but all of the future albums with the big productions as well,” Teemu discloses. “What is happening now is that we have completed the first crowdfunding, and it was a great success. We’re so grateful for all of the people that supported us there, and now we’re gonna be touring for a bit more than a year from now, doing festivals and then different tours until about next autumn. Then that’s the time when we’re gonna see about starting to write the next album, and start the next crowdfunding.

“Time II is not going to be the next album; as we announced in crowdfunding, the idea is that each of these crowdfundings is going to have a totally new Wintersun album in them. It is possible that if the crowdfunding goes as well as the first one, then maybe after a second round of crowdfunding, we have the possibility to start going into the studio right away.

“As soon as we have a chance to work in the studio, then I think Time II is going to be completed probably pretty fast from that point on. At the moment it’s too early to say when it’s going to be happening, though. The next round of crowdfunding is probably going to take a while to prepare and do everything else, so it’s too early to say or estimate any specific time yet. The good thing is that Time II is kind of more maybe timeless stuff you could say, though. I think even if it stays on the shelf for a while, I think people are still gonna be liking it when it comes out. Of course, it would be great for us to get Time II out of our system and be able to concentrate totally on new things. We’re definitely looking forward to that as well, to be able to complete Time II as soon as possible.”

The Forest Seasons was released on July 21st, 2017 via Nuclear Blast Records.

Interview published in July 2017. All promotional photographs by Onni Wiljami Kinnunen.

In attempting to realise July 2017 platter Defying Gravity – the ninth full-length studio album from Los Angeles, California-based hard rock outfit Mr. Big – members Eric Martin (vocals), Paul Gilbert (guitars), Billy Sheehan (bass) and Pat Torpey (drums), not to mention fill-in member Matt Starr (drums), were forced to mutually agree upon a block of time where all were collectively free.

“Everybody’s got their own projects going on, but we really wanted to do a Mr. Big record, and so we had to co-ordinate the schedules of everybody in the band, and also our producer,” begins Paul Gilbert. “We wanted to use Kevin Elson this time, who was the producer we used for our classic albums from the 80s and 90s. We found about a six-day period where everybody was free, and we thought ‘Is that enough time?’ We thought ‘We don’t know, but let’s just try hard,’ and so we all wrote songs and prepared as much as we could, and it was perfect. We got everything done, and got all of the basic tracks. Of course, after we were finished with that and we weren’t all together, Eric could keep working on his vocals, I did a couple of guitar solo overdubs on the road, and Kevin mixed the album. The majority of the stuff we did while we were together though, and it was nice to have that urgency. We knew that when we were in there, we had to work and we had to get it done. We had to make it great. It was a really enjoyable experience; I really had a great time of it.”

Some compositions were penned in solitude, while others were more collaborative. “I flew down to LA and got together with Pat and Billy a few times before the sessions started,” the axeman informs. “When Eric writes, a lot of times we’ll send him ideas that we’ve come up with, and then he’ll add his vocals to that, and continue writing from an idea we had started. Some songs came together that way while other songs were ones we had written on our own, and so it was really just a combination of everything.”

Paul was responsible for the authorship of the following tracks; ‘1992’, ‘Open Your Eyes’, ‘Mean To Me’, ‘Be Kind’, and ‘Nothing Bad (Bout Feeling Good)’. “Each song is sort of its own universe; they’re different from each other,” he reckons. “‘1992’ is the first one that comes to mind, and that one we’ve been playing live a lot. I think I like it because it’s got a lot of vocal harmonies, and that’s something I’ve always enjoyed about Mr. Big. Back when we did the Lean Into It record (March 1991), we had songs like ‘Green-Tinted Sixties Mind’, ‘Just Take My Heart’, and of course ‘To Be With You’. Those featured so many vocal harmonies and I’ve always loved that, so ‘1992’ has a lot of that, but it’s also a heavy song.

“It starts off with Billy and me doing some crazy instrumental stuff, and it’s got this big, heavy riff. It’s sort of a nice combination of all of those elements and of course lyrically it’s an interesting song, because it’s kind of an autobiography of the amazing experience we had in 1992, of having a number-one single (‘To Be With You’). So, that’s one of my favourites. We’ve been playing it live, and it’s been going over great. ‘Open Your Eyes’ is the opening track on the album, and again, I enjoy it because it’s got vocal harmonies that trade off of the Lean Into It vocals, and I think it’s got a pretty heavy guitar riff. There are a couple of cool solo breaks in it.

“The song is just about appreciating what goes on in your day, and for me, that’s being a musician. I use a line in the song about how if you do what you want, you’ll never work another day in your life, and I think every musician appreciates that. I’m so glad that what I do for my job is something that I would do no matter what. Don’t tell anybody, but I would do this for free because I love it.

“‘Be Kind’, this is a song where the older I’ve become and the more experiences I’ve had in my life, I think the more I’ve really realised that I’m not the only person in the world, and other people have their own situations and challenges. To kind of appreciate that and have empathy and be kind to people, because you never know what they’re going through at that time, or what they’ve had to go through to get to where they are. It’s really trying to feel what other people feel and being kind to them, so a pretty straight-ahead message. I also really like that song musically. It’s based on a lot of the blues and soul music that I’ve been listening to lately. I’ve been listening to artists like Ray Charles and Nina Simone, and getting into stuff that’s not strictly heavy metal, and learning new chords from other styles of music and new ways to play guitar.

“Let’s see… ‘Nothing Bad (Bout Feeling Good)’. That one definitely came from the lyrics first; trying to get a melody to fit the lyrics, and just letting the song build itself from there. It’s an interesting song, because the verse is very different than the chorus. That was probably the most challenging one for us to do in the studio, because it was almost like trying to do two songs in one, and make them flow smoothly back and forth between the two parts. I was really happy that Kevin Elson could help us work that out, because it was a tricky one.

Paul Gilbert

“‘Mean To Me’, that was actually sparked by a drum idea. I’d heard a Christina Aguilera song, which was obviously a pop song, but the drum programming on that song reminded me of Scott Travis – the drummer I used to play with in Racer X, and of course he’s been playing in Judas Priest for years. It just reminded me of his double-bass style, and I thought ‘Well, that’s kind of interesting,’ that a pop artist would put these really fast bass drums in their pop song. I started kind of imitating it on my guitar, where I would play the kick-drum part on my lower strings – sort of a chunky thing – and then I would hit the chord stabs with the higher strings. I changed the notes around so it doesn’t sound like Christina Aguilera anymore – now, it’s my song. That was the original idea, though, hearing that and going ‘Wow, I can’t believe it. It sounds like Scott Travis playing this style in an ultra-pop song’.”

Perhaps the influence of the likes of Ray Charles and Nina Simone will be audible in future solo material, even if in a subtle fashion. “Lately, overall, I’ve been into being a better improviser, and in a way I see improvising as being a combination of two things,” the musician observes. “One of the things is what your fingers will do on the guitar. Of course I’m a guitar player, so I’m thinking as a guitarist. I have to work within my physical limitations as to what my hands will do, and also the patterns I’m familiar with, and the places that my fingers are used to going. The other part of it is more pure improvisation though, and that’s what I hear in my head, and that’s a combination of just what I hear instinctively. I don’t know where my instincts come from – probably a lot of listening – but that’s a little more mysterious. It also comes from training my ear though, and I think listening to great improvisers and great melodies is a quick way to train that instinct.

“I tend to listen to a lot of singers, and actually one of my solo albums – Stone Pushing Uphill Man (August 2014) – was sort of a project in proving my melodic instincts by learning vocal parts on guitar. I just picked all of my favourite singers – everybody from Steven Tyler (Aerosmith) to James Brown, to Paul McCartney (The Beatles), to Eric Carmen… just all kinds of different styles – and tried to play those vocal parts. That’s really to me… The part of improvising is the most interesting thing to me at the moment, because I’ve trained my fingers so much that they can jump around the fretboard and do a lot of things, but it tends to be the same. Like any faster player, we’ve got our best licks, and they tend to be the same.

“I’ve found that as I’ve learned to improvise melodically, it seems like I can come up with a bigger variety of stuff. I kind of selfishly enjoy it more, because I’m in the moment so much. When you play something that your fingers do, you’re almost kind of living in the past. You play something you’ve spent a lot of time practising, but when you play something that you hear in your head, it might be inspired by something in the past, although the combination is something that can be brand new. As a player and as an improviser, that’s really exciting. I think that’s one of the reasons why I listen to a lot of singers, and I think that the singers who came from blues and from soul music are some of the best.”

Room for improvisation exists within a live setting, although said room is dependant upon the given track. “If I’m doing ‘To Be With You’, I’m not gonna be doing a lot of improvising because that solo is so based on the vocal melody that I just wanna keep it the way it is,” Paul reasons. “Most people have heard that a lot, but if we’re doing a song like… Well actually, even ‘1992’, which is a heavier song. I can still improvise on the solo – it’s different every night – or a song like ‘Undertow’ (from January 2011’s What If…), which again… To me, that chord progression is much more of a metal chord progression, but I play it different every night. The improvising that I study with blues and soul pays off, even when I play a metal song, the style in a way doesn’t matter so much. It more becomes just pure notes.”

A signature tune for Mr. Big, one would surmise that the songwriter has grown tired of continually performing ‘To Be With You’. “Oh, I love it,” he counters. “Like I said, I love singing harmonies. Before I even became a guitar player, I wanted to be a Beatle (laughs). That was my first dream as a musician, was to be like a Beatle. They were much more of a band that emphasizes the songwriting and the singing. Occasionally there’s a cool guitar riff, but if you listen to the way a Beatles record is mixed, the vocals are much louder than the guitar. Getting to do that was my original dream, so I love that as well. That’s the nice thing about being in Mr. Big, is I’m not only the guitar player. I’m the background singer, and so I get to do both of those things. Sometimes we even switch instruments and I get to be the drummer.”

Many a musician who dreamt of being a Beatle tended to have fantasized about being a specific member of the Fab Four. “Oh, any of them,” Paul clarifies. “I wasn’t really focused on which one. I just wanted to sing. I do remember watching Hard Day’s Night (1964), and there was a part where they were performing. The camera zooms in to members of the audience, and you can’t hear them because everybody’s screaming. You can’t hear the individuals, but you can read their lips. At one point there’s a girl, and you can read her lips. She’s screaming ‘Paul’ (McCartney), which of course is my name, and that’s a powerful thing. Just to see a girl screaming your name, even if you know it’s another Paul (laughs).

“I think that left an impression, but really it was the music. I just loved the music. At that time, I couldn’t watch that movie every day because it was before there were computers and laptops. There weren’t even VCRs then. I think I saw that once and it left a small impression, but the biggest impression was the album covers of the vinyl records, and just listening to them over and over again.”

And as well, many a musician tends to harbour a favourite period of The Beatles’ musical career. “Really, I loved all of it,” the axe-slinger enthuses. “I tend to like the earlier stuff, just because of the energy of it. I get a sense that they were all really excited about what they were doing, and just kind of blown away by their success. Mentioning when we did our new album, we were able to do it in six days, and there was an urgency to that. I think when you look back at the history of the Beatles or the Beach Boys, or the pop bands of the 60s, they were all doing that same kind of thing. The Beatles’ first album (Please Please Me, March 1963), I think they did it in a day. They were doing things that are now considered to be so legendary, and if you look at the amount of time they spent, they were just writing their albums in their hotel room, and recording three songs in a day. Their schedule was insane. I think a lot of it was inspired by how incredibly successful they were, and just being excited about that. I love to hear that in music.”

Recording sessions for Defying Gravity took place at a Los Angeles studio across six days, sessions typically adhering to a given pattern. “We’d show up at the studio around noon” Paul lists. “Before then, I would get up at eight in the morning to try to finish up the verses of the song that I was writing. Maybe I had the idea for ‘Mean To Me’, but I only had the first verse. So, I’d get up and work on that a bit and try to finish up the lyrics, and just rehearse the arrangement a little bit because I knew I was going to have to show it to the band. Then I’d get to the studio by noon. At first we would probably work on the song that we had started the night before. Maybe we had rehearsed it a little bit, but now we had been able to sleep on it. We’d work on recording that, and that would take a few hours.

“Then I’d say ‘Hey guys, I wrote this new song before breakfast. Wanna check it out?’ (laughs). We’d listen to it, and try that a little bit, and start working with it. Then within a couple of hours, we’d have that one finished. Then we’d start on one of Eric’s songs, and then go ‘That sounded great. Let’s go to bed, and we’ll start up fresh with that tomorrow.’ Somewhere in there, we’d squeeze in lots of food and coffee.”

As referenced, Defying Gravity marks the return of Kevin Elson behind the production chair; Elson last twiddled the knobs for Mr. Big on January 1996 jaunt Hey Man. “I’m surprised it took us this long, because we had always loved working with him,” the performer remarks. “He’s busy. He’s a very sought after live sound engineer; he’s worked with everybody from Michael Jackson to Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Journey, and of course us. It was great to see him again. He always has a great ear and great ideas, and he’s really patient. With our schedules for this record, we didn’t have much time to be patient, but he wouldn’t give up on things. When I came in with my song ‘Nothing Bad (Bout Feeling Good)’, it didn’t work right away. We tried it, but we were like ‘I don’t know. The tempo might not be right’. He thought ‘Hey, it’s got a good melody. If it takes another hour, it’s alright,’ though. He would really have faith in the music, and keep working on it until the song worked.”

Schedules would need to align to pave the way for Kevin to produce further material from the quartet. “I’d like for him to, but we’ll have to wait for our next album to come around,” Paul notes. “We’ll have to see when we can find our next six-day opening (laughs), and who’s available.”

Kevin helmed production for Mr. Big’s June 1989 self-titled debut. “For me, I was really impressed that I could work with him,” the guitarist remembers. “The first time I met him, he was running sound for Michael Jackson, and he was the biggest artist in the world at that time. Here I am, I had just come out of Racer X – which was a successful club band in LA – but this was my first time working with a major label, and working with this legendary producer. He had done all of the big Journey records, and he had worked with Lynyrd Skynyrd. I think I wanted to be good, and I also wanted to be careful. I didn’t want to make him angry, or do something dumb (laughs), so I would just prepare a lot.

“And I’ll never forget… Back in those days, he would give me homework. I remember when we recorded ‘Daddy, Brother, Lover, Little Boy’. We recorded the basic track of the song, and I think this was before there even CDs – or, at least you couldn’t record your own CD. We were still working with cassettes, so he made me a cassette of the basic track. He said ‘Take this back home tonight, and write a solo for it. Have it prepared so when you come in tomorrow, we don’t have to waste time working out what you’re going to play.’ That worked out great. I spent the whole night working out a solo, and planning what I was going to play. Then when I came in, I could do it one take, and after I did that, he said ‘Let’s double track it.’ He really knew how to organise things, how to inspire us, and how to give good homework.”

Paul is arguably more Kevin’s equal in 2017 compared to 1989. “I was excited to show him how I play now,” he shares. “It’s been probably like 20 years since he has heard me play or at least heard me play in the same room, and my blues playing has gotten so much better since then. I know that that’s something that he loves. I was kind of excited to show him ‘Look, I can do this now,’ and the same thing with slide playing as I’ve gotten older. In the old days, I used to overdub a slide solo sometimes, and he would just look at me like ‘No, no. You’re not ready for that.’ This time, I overdubbed the slide thing, and he loved it. He said ‘Oh, that’s great.’ I really felt like I could impress him in ways that I couldn’t in the old days.”

Defying Gravity includes the involvement of drummer Pat Torpey, in spite of his Parkinson’s disease diagnosis. “Pat was like the drum producer,” the axeman divulges. “Him and Matt worked as a team to make the drum tracks happen, and that worked so much better than the last album. With the last album, we tried to programme everything. We of course wanted Pat to be involved, but with his physical challenges, he wasn’t able to play as strongly as he needed to. We thought that maybe he could play on electronic drums and record them with midi, and then he could edit that. It just became complicated. In the end it worked, but it just slowed it down. We never could have done it in six days, that’s for sure.

“For this, we had Matt who’s our touring drummer that comes out and tours, and of course Pat tours with us too. He’s there every day playing percussion, and he gets up on a song or two. We relied on the both of them to work together to make the drums in the studio though, so Matt was playing the kit. Pat would be the producer and have suggestions; about how the groove should go, and about what kinds of sounds to use. The goal was to make it sound like Pat Torpey, and there were the two of them that could do that. That was fantastic.”

In light of Pat suffering from Parkinson’s disease, fans wonder as to the man’s health status. “He’s doing great,” Paul replies. “He may be able to give you a few more details if you talk to him, but from watching him play and watching him on the road, he’s onstage with a big smile on his face and gets up on a song or two. I’m so glad he’s out with us; he’s part of the band, so it’s important that he’s there.”

Pleasurable it is to see that Pat isn’t letting Parkinson’s get the better of him. “I think it’s important for everybody in their life to not give up,” the musician offers. “Everybody has challenges in their life. Pat has a big one now, and I know that he has had his struggles with it. I think one of the biggest struggles was an emotional one; knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to do what he did before. For any musician, that would be really hard to deal with, but after having the support of his family and having the support of us, and us helping him, now every day he’s in a great mood. He’s contributing, and it’s great to see him not giving up. It’s inspiring to all of us.”

Paul has carved out a solo career away from Mr. Big, although solo endeavours aren’t currently on the agenda. “At the moment, there’s not much time,” he laments. “I’m busy with Mr. Big, and in-between that, I work on my Online Guitar School. I’ve done more than 5,000 videos now for my school. I’ll give it a plug; it’s with a company called ArtistWorks. I’ve got the Rock School. Before I had this interview with you today, I did a couple of videos for my students there, and I really enjoy that. As much as I’m the teacher, as the teacher I learn more than anybody. I love to learn, and in order to teach, I’ve got to know what I’m talking about, and so it makes me research music and it makes me practice. It makes me organise my thoughts about music, and it’s made me smarter and better. I continue to enjoy that a lot.”

Teaching how to play guitar, the composer often returns to a central piece of advice. “From teaching, it’s made me realise a lot of things that are important to me with style, and these are subjective things.” he views. “Every style has its own things that are important, but for me, I love 70s rock guitar; kind of starting with Jimi Hendrix and maybe ending with Van Halen, and all of the players in-between like Brian May (Queen), Robin Trower, Angus Young (AC/DC), Gary Moore (ex-Thin Lizzy), Michael Schenker (ex-Scorpions / ex-UFO), Uli Jon Roth (ex-Scorpions), Joe Perry (Aerosmith), Alex Lifeson (Rush), and all of the players from the 70s. That’s just my favourite time for rock guitar, and Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) of course – I have to mention him, and Pete Townsend (The Who).

“Those players, they came from the blues. Maybe they were second generation, or third generation blues players really, and because of that they had great vibrato. They could bend strings really well. When I listen to Mick Ralphs play that note in ‘Rock Steady’ (from June 1974 debut Bad Company), a Bad Company song, that’s one of the biggest things I want to get from my guitar – those beautiful bending and sustaining notes – and a lot of modern players aren’t into that. They’re more into big, chunky things. They want to play a chunky rhythm, and it’s more about percussion than it is about soulful bending. This is just my own style preference.

“I really want to share with players how much fun it is, and what a great sound it is to be able to bend a note well. In order to do that, you have to have a certain position with the guitar. You’ve got to hold it a certain way, and people aren’t doing that any more. As a teacher, it’s my mission to let people know you’ve got to have the guitar a little bit lower, and you’ve got to get your thumb over the top of the neck. If you do that, you’ll be able to grab the string, and you’ll have some strength with it, and you’ll have a fighting chance of bending it. When you hold it up high and play it like a classical musician though, you can’t bend it. You just don’t have the grip.”

The musicians whom Paul referenced arguably had moments where they shone in the tracks they performed on, but were part of a band and complemented their respective bandmates. “Oh, absolutely,” Paul responds. “Working with singers and writing great songs. It was hard for me to become an instrumental guitarist; I never wanted to do that. I wasn’t really a big fan of instrumental music, but I think I’ve come to love the guitar so much that I just try to sing with my guitar, and hopefully it doesn’t feel as much like instrumental music when it is. Yeah though, that’s why even with my solo stuff, I sing a lot. I just love that format.”

Defying Gravity was released on July 21st, 2017 via Frontiers Music Srl.

In authoring compositions for July 2017 outing Anticult – the seventh full-length studio album from Polish death metal outfit Decapitated – guitarist Wacław ‘Vogg’ Kiełtyka crafted parts in much the same fashion, bring together musical ideas for riffs, melodies, and the like. Anticult marked the first occasion Vogg worked in collaboration with drummer Michał Łysejko, whose stepping behind the kit was revealed on March 13th, 2014.

“He helped me a lot with the arrangements for the songs,” Vogg credits. “As I said though, I came up with all of the ideas for the album, and then we added the bass lines and the vocal arrangements for the lyrics. It took us quite long; it took us about nine months to create all of the stuff before the studio. We worked in my home studio; we put all the riffs into the programme, and then we programmed the drums. Then after that, we practised all of the stuff in the rehearsal room to check if everything was right, and then we just entered the studio. And yeah, studio recording was done in the classic way; first the drums, then the guitars, bass, and vocals. That was it.”

Extremity isn’t solely at the heart of Anticult. “We thought the album should be a very extreme metal album, but at the same time with lots of melodies – like a crossover album for Decapitated,” the axeman describes. “We connected lots of different styles of metal into one piece, and also we thought about making this album not too long. That’s why it’s 38 minutes, which in my opinion is enough time to deliver all of the interesting ideas we had in order to make this album interesting, and not too long. It’s kind of hard to write more than 40 minutes of interesting stuff. That was the main goal, trying to make the songs a bit shorter. Yeah, that was the main thing that we thought about.”

Past Decapitated tracks were too great in length, Vogg reckons. “Most of the songs from the previous album Blood Mantra (September 2014) were like six minutes long, or even more,” he cites. “That was the problem during live shows. If you have a setlist that includes six-minute long songs, it’s kind of… I don’t know. It’s just hard to set up. It’s cool to also have some shorter songs, and that’s why every song off of this album is way shorter – at least one minute shorter than those on the Blood Mantra album. We just made different arrangements; you don’t have to wait that long for the vocals or the solo, and everything strikes you a little bit before. I think the arrangements are much better for this album than Blood Mantra.”

Sporting shorter cuts arguably hearkens back more to the LP days of the music landscape. “I just think that for Decapitated and for my tastes, 40 minutes is long enough for a metal album – for a Decapitated album,” the musician clarifies. “If someone wants to do a longer album, that’s no problem of course, but it’s really hard in my opinion to make an hour of interesting music. You need to be some kind of genius, like maybe Devin Townsend, or I don’t know. I know of a few albums, like for example the first album from Machine Head (Burn My Eyes, August 1994), or Sepultura’s Arise (March 1991), or Pantera’s Cowboys From Hell (July 1990), and those kinds of albums. They were quite long, but at the same quite interesting and never boring. These days though, it’s hard for me to find a long and interesting metal album.”

In a quest to continually spawn an ‘interesting metal album’, Decapitated has evolved their musical sound through the years. “Decapitated is a band that evolves all the time,” Vogg feels. “Every album is different. It just happens naturally, without any thought behind it. I just play what I like to play; I just play what I feel. I’ve changed, and my life has changed since I was 15, and then with the first album Winds Of Creation back in the day (April 2000). I’ve changed a lot; I have kids right now, and I drink a lot. Lots of things have happened in the history of the band, like accidents, and experiences with people from labels. What I would say is that life is changing and the music is changing together with me, and that’s a natural process. I cannot be the same person as I was 20 years ago. I think I’m more open-minded right now; I’m not afraid to add some new elements to Decapitated’s music.”

Wacław ‘Vogg’ Kiełtyka

As the axe-slinger acknowledges, he is a different individual in 2017 compared to Decapitated’s earlier years. “If you look at yourself 20 years ago and how you were 20 years ago, you are for sure not the same person as you were 20 years ago,” he muses. “Everything changes. The ways of things influence me, like lots of happenings. Lots of things influence changes in my life. Every day, I’m a different man. It’s hard to mention a few particular moments in my life that changed my life. It just changes. Every day, you wake up from the bad news. You think differently, and you’re different. You look different; you wear different clothes, you eat different food, and stuff like that. You read different newspapers, and different news and TV. I don’t know.”

A difference can be pinpointed within the material itself; Decapitated was predominantly death metal in its earlier years, but has more musical influences now. “It does, but I cannot find a particular reason for that,” Vogg observes. “I just feel free to play. I listen to not only death metal. 20 years ago, I was a death metal kid. I was listening to Morbid Angel, Deicide, and Cannibal Corpse all the time, so my music was inspired by those kinds of bands. These days, I listen to all kinds of music. I tried to find my own language in the music, and for me, only playing technical stuff these days isn’t possible.

“I’m 35-years-old, not 15. When I was 15, I tried to show the world how good I was on the guitar and tried to write the most difficult riffs, because I was 15-years-old and had tons of energy. I wanted to show all of the girls that it was cool that I was so fucking perfect on the guitar. These days, I don’t care any more about these things. I think about having a good sound from the guitar, and making some nice, catchy riffs and a crushing sound. Everything in my opinion that is sounding good I put into Decapitated albums, and that’s the only way I can see right now for this band.”

Speaking of riffs, not all that the co-founder penned surfaced within Anticult’s material. “There were a bunch of riffs that I didn’t use, but I don’t have any finished songs that I didn’t use – only a few riffs,” he notes. “I just completed the songs that I put on the album, but yeah, I have a few riffs. I will use them maybe for the next album, or whatever. I have a few interesting riffs. It’s just those riffs didn’t fit for the songs, and that’s why I didn’t use them.”

Anticult cements the 2016 arrival of bassist Hubert Więcek, and the departure of Paweł Pasek. “Paweł our previous bass player left the band because he had personal problems, family problems,” Vogg informs. “That’s why he decided to leave the band. We found Hubert, who is our new bass player. I was asking my friends on Facebook. I posted that we were looking for a new bass player, and Hubert sent me a video of him playing to one of our songs. It was all good, all great. He’s a good guy, and he brings some new, fresh blood and fresh energy into the band. Also, what’s interesting is that he is also a guitar player and all this stuff, so he’s always helpful with bringing in new elements into the band. Yeah, he brings good things into the band. He recorded the bass for the Anticult album, which has changed our sound a little bit. This is actually an album where you can really hear the bass sound, which is great.”

The greater presence of the bass on Anticult was an intentional stance. “It just sounded good with lots of bass, so we decided to leave lots of breaks in the riffs because it just sounded great,” the performer views. “We have a really great bass guitar doing some great instrumental things, which adds something great and special. So yeah, it’s great. You can hear three instruments plus vocals on it. It’s how Decapitated sounds in 2017. I’m very proud and satisfied about the final sound of the record.”

The band dynamic within Decapitated during 2017 contrasts with the days immediately following its formation, Vogg adopting more of a leadership role nowadays given his length of service. “There have been a lot of changes in the band’s history, yeah, in terms of the line-up,” he recognises. “I don’t know. I’m the leader of the band right now. In the beginning of the band in 1996 and in 2007, I was kind of the leader, but there was a more democratic system in the band I would say. It was Vitek my brother who also created some songs with me, and we created the sound of Decapitated together. Right now though, I’m the only original member of the band. I’ve become the leader of the band, and the backbone of the band (laughs). So yeah, that comes from the changes within the band.”

November 2nd, 2017 will mark ten years since the passing of Vitek at the age of 23, Decapitated having been involved in a vehicle accident on October 28th that year – their tour bus colliding with a truck carrying wood in Gomel, near the border from Russia to Belarus. A commemorative show to mark Vitek’s passing would arguably seem apt. “I’m not sure,” the entertainer ponders. “I’m not that kind of guy. I don’t really like to mention any anniversaries, especially when it comes to the death of my brother. I don’t know. I like to celebrate things like birthdays, or maybe… Some good things, some positive things, like the start of the band, and stuff like that. I don’t know. We’ll see. I remember it every day, and I remember all of the days with Vitek when we played together, and when we started the band together. We’ll see. I don’t have any plans right now to commemorate it at all. Maybe the band will play together. If this would make the fans happy, then we will go for it, but we’ll see.”

Not all Decapitated fanatics were fortunate enough to meet the sticksman, although the man’s brother is happy to share specific memories. “He was a down to earth guy, the most down to earth guy I knew in my life,” Vogg enthuses. “He was a real friend. Even though he was only 23 when he died, he was so measured as a person, like a real natural person. He never got into any problems with other people, and he was always smart with every situation – on tours, or whatever in life. He was a really down to earth guy that you would like from the first talk with him.

“He was always smiling, and he was also such a great drummer. I cannot imagine how good he would have been these days. After 20 years, oh my God, he would have been like number one, or at least one of the best drummers on the planet. He was 23, but he was like, oh my God, such a great drummer. He was in musical school playing piano at 12-years-old. He got a feel for music, and his playing and drumming was different; very dynamic and very musical.”

Freedom happens to be one lyrical preoccupation prevalent on Anticult. “The lyrics talk about being free from the political or religious system,” the guitarist expands. “They rule the humans on our planet. For me, this album talks about being free, about having freedom. There are situations going on in the world right now, in Europe especially. There are terrorist attacks, and immigration from Syria. This was influential for the lyrical aspect of the album. Rafał (‘Rasta’ Piotrowski, vocals) wrote the lyrics, and I think he was kind of pissed off about what’s going on in the world these days. And also the cover artwork for the album, there is a correspondence between what’s going on and how some are telling others what to do and what to think, and it’s kind of a terrible thing.

“The lyrics don’t only talk about that, though. For example, we have the ‘Earth Scar’ song, talking about us as a band. We are travelling all over the world, and we are going to different countries and seeing different cultures. It’s written in a metaphoric way; it describes us as musicians travelling and making scars on the planet, which is probably a good thing.”

Mixing and drum production for Anticult fell to Daniel Bergstrand, as was the case with July 2011 platter Carnival Is Forever. “He set up the drums for the record, and also did the mix,” Vogg lists. “He’s an amazing producer, and an amazing guy. We recorded with a new guy – Tomasz Zalewski – who recorded the guitars, bass and vocals. He did an amazing job as well, so we did this record in three different places. We recorded the drums at Custom34 Studios in Gdansk, then we recorded the guitars and the rest of the stuff at ZED Studios in Chechło, which is a small village in Poland.

“Then we sent all of the stuff to Sweden for Daniel Bergstrand to do all of the mixing and mastering, so yeah. Daniel has worked with In Flames and Meshuggah. He did a lot of Meshuggah records; he did Koloss for Meshuggah (March 2012), he did Chaosphere (November 1998), and yeah, a few more Meshuggah records. The bands are so different, from In Flames, to Dimmu Borgir, to lots of bands. He mixed the album in the studio alone for two weeks, and then he sent us the final results. We just made a little bit of corrections to the sound, and that was it. It was pretty hard to work with him at the end of this, because he was fighting for his mix and we were fighting for ours. There were a couple of days of fighting between us, but we finally got to a point where we had some great results.

“We changed the team for recording and mixing and the studios, and the results are great. It sounds different, and really good. It has a very organic, raw sound, which I really like.”

As was the case with many of Decapitated’s previous full-lengths, Anticult was a self-production. “It was, yeah,” the axeman confirms. “We didn’t have a producer for the record. I’m the main producer for Decapitated; I know how I want to play and what I want to do with my songs, so for this album, we didn’t use any producer. I make the songs, and we record by ourselves. I don’t know how it would be with a producer maybe, but I feel good about producing stuff. For now, I don’t know if we need someone to help us out with the production. Maybe in the future. We’ll see. If we have a better budget for recording so we can ask some of the greatest producers for help, then why not? I also think this is a band that knows what it wants though, and knows how to play. I don’t think that a producer is an important person, but I think a producer is helpful for a band who aren’t sure what to do.”

The prospect of producing other artists has yet to be entertained. “No, I don’t think so,” Vogg considers. “It’s a different thing. I don’t think I have the time right now to do things like that. I just produce my band, and I try to make my band the best. I try to take care of my band members and give them my 20 years experience of music, or even more experience. It’s really been my whole life, so it’s more like 30 years of experience. No, I think I will concentrate on only playing guitar for now. Maybe in the future, but not right now. I’m too busy.

Engineering is a prospect not being entertained, on the other hand. “I don’t think I have enough experience to be an engineer in the studio,” the musician figures. “Maybe I could be a producer, like telling bands and telling people how to play or something like that. I could be a producer, but not for now – maybe in the future when I have a little bit more time. I’m such a busy guy right now; I have a band, I have two kids, I have a family. I have tons of things to set up every day, and that’s taking all of my time for now.”

Albeit not engineer-minded, Vogg favours a specific guitar sound. “I’m looking for a deep and full sound,” he shares. “I don’t know. I just know how to do it – I don’t know how to explain it (laughs). It’s good when you have a crisp, huge and heavy sound. Yeah, I’m looking for something like that, a heavy and clear sound. Looking for a guitar sound takes two things; it’s equipment, and it’s your own sound from the hands. I think I have my own sound from the hands, which satisfies me a lot. The other things are microphones, speakers, and amplifiers. I’m always looking to make different sounds, and sounds which are better and better of course. I think I have that, and I’m really satisfied with the guitar sound on Anticult. I was using my Ibanez custom guitar and EVH amps, and it sounded great. It’s about the technique to record, and I’ve discovered a new technique with Tomasz Zalewski the new engineer. It’s really killer to record with this guy, but I won’t say how he did it because it’s a top secret thing (laughs).”

The Decapitated co-founder favours Ibanez for several reasons. “I went for it because they offer me a very good deal for the guitars,” he tells. “To be a part of LA Custom Shop guitars, it’s kind of an honour to be in the same team as Steve Vai, Fredrik Thordendal (Meshuggah), Paul Gilbert (Mr. Big), and other great guitar players on the planet. They offer me a really, really good deal for the guitars, so I don’t have to worry about having bad guitars right now. Yeah, I just love the sound. I’ve already recorded two albums with this Ibanez LA Custom model from them, and I’m totally, 100% satisfied with all of their gear, so that’s why.”

Cutting albums aside, a live DVD release from Decapitated in 2017 would seem timely, previous live offering Human’s Dust having arrived in June 2008. “It would be killer to do it,” Vogg surmises. “Maybe we would have to set up things with Earache Records to have the rights to record a live DVD with the older songs on it, but yeah. We just need to play a little bit more shows to prepare a very good show – like the light show, and stuff like that – and find the time for that, and find good circumstances to make this killer DVD. We’ll think about it, for sure.”

Anticult was released on July 7th, 2017 via Nuclear Blast.

Interview published in July 2017. All promotional photographs by Oscar Szramka.

Outside of commitments with Sheffield, England-based hard rock outfit Def Leppard, guitarist Vivian Campbell plies his trade with Last In Line – Last In Line including founding members of Dio, among other musicians. February 2016 debut full-length studio album Heavy Crown arrived through Frontiers, the Italian label hoping to further strengthen its relationship with Vivian.

“They approached me shortly after the record was released, and asked me if I would be interested in doing a record with Riverdogs,” he recalls. “They were big fans of the original Riverdogs record; they wanted to know if we could do an album, if there was interest, that was very similar to the original Riverdogs record in style, substance, and sound.

“I really enjoyed working with Riverdogs. That first album we made, it’s sort of unfinished business in a way. I think we made a great record, and the record really fell off of a cliff. It never did anything, but it’s gone on to be bit of a cult classic all these decades later, so I really felt we had a point to prove. The fact that Frontiers were also big fans of the original Riverdogs album and wanted something in a similar style kind of gave us a chance to revisit that part of our life and our career. So, I called up the other guys in the band – Rob Lamothe (vocals and guitars), Nick Brophy (bass), and Marc Danzeisen (drums) – and I talked it over with them, and everyone was just as enthusiastic to do it. We got together, and California (July 2017) is the end result.”

Riverdog’s self-titled debut studio affair emerged in May 1990. “There was still a lot of hair metal going on here in LA, and Riverdogs were not like that,” the axeman views. “I mean, yeah, we had a lot of hair like everyone else in rock in those days, but the music we were making was much more organic. It was much more Americana. It was sort of a fusion of Americana and rock meets heavy blues. Kind of like if you imagine Free, but if Paul Kosoff (guitars) and Paul Rodgers (vocals) had moved to southern America for a year and done a record, it would have been influenced that way. The only thing that was comparable to what we were doing back then would have been Jake E. Lee’s band, Badlands, so it was a unique sound. We certainly didn’t sound like a lot of the other acts that were around at the time.”

Riverdog’s aforementioned self-titled debut jaunt wasn’t originally envisioned with Vivian handling guitar parts. “I kind of fell into being in the band,” he remembers. “When I first started working with Riverdogs, I was producing some demos for the band, and they had an original guitar player who wasn’t working out. They weren’t really working well with him, and I was with Whitesnake at the time. I could tell that my tenure with Whitesnake was coming to a close; I could sense that it wasn’t going to be lasting much longer. The Riverdogs, I’d be in the studio with them. At night when the guitar player was gone, they’d ask me ‘Would you mind doing some guitar parts on this record – on these demos – to bolster it?’ I said ‘Look, I don’t feel comfortable doing that. You have a guitar player in the band – it’s not my place to step on his toes.’

“Over the course of the next couple of months, I parted company with Whitesnake and Riverdogs parted company with their original guitar player, so I decided to join the band full-time. I was very impressed by the talent level, particularly by Rob’s writing and singing. I think he’s a world class singer, and certainly a world class writer. I’ve always had a lot of faith in his talents and in the band, so I took a chance. I joined the band. We started writing some more songs, and did some shows around southern California. We were all living in LA at the time, and seven months later we got a record deal. We signed with CBS Records, and they gave us a budget. What happened after that kind of set us back a long time.

“We had a very difficult time finding a producer that we were happy to work with and that our record company was happy that we worked with, so we went back and forth on a number of people. About a year passed, and we realised that we were dwindling the recording budget. We really needed to get into the studio and make a record, so we ended up compromising on our choice of producer. We went into the studio, but after about a month, we realised that the situation with the producer was untenable. It wasn’t gonna work, so we ended up getting rid of that producer. We brought in Jeff Glixman to finish the record, and that worked really, really well. We wished we had started the record with Jeff, so Jeff finished up the recording of the record, and he mixed it.

Vivian Campbell

“This took about a year and a half, from when I joined the band to when we got the record out. During that time, CBS Records had been sold to Sony. There had been a whole field of changes throughout the entire record division; a lot of the people that we had started working with were no longer there, or they had been moved to different departments. Most importantly though, there was a new label head who came in, and I remember he took us out to dinner the week the record was actually released. He said ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t feel like I can get onboard with this record. I don’t hear it, I don’t feel it. I’d like you to start work on your second album.’

“We were just devastated; we were all heartbroken. It had taken 18 months to get to this stage, and we just couldn’t do it. I personally couldn’t do it, because for the 18 months it had taken to get to that stage, I had been the only guy in the band not drawing a salary from the recording budget. I had been paying my mortgage and all of my bills, and I literally couldn’t afford to not work any more. I had to apologise to the other guys, and say ‘Hey, look. I can’t do this. I need to move on, and get a job that pays my mortgage.’

“The Riverdogs did continue without me. About a year or so after that, I ended up joining Def Leppard, and I’ve been with Leppard for about 25 years. The Riverdogs did continue, though; they made another couple of records with Nick Brophy moving from bass guitar to lead guitar, and that was it. So, it kind of does feel like unfinished business. We kind of got the rug pulled out from under us on the original album. It’s just nice to get a second bite of the cherry, and to come back and have a second stab at it.”

The composer has occupied the Def Leppard ranks since April 1992, Riverdogs’ output past the May 1990 debut offering not on the man’s radar. “To be honest, I’m not familiar with them,” he admits. “I honestly don’t know enough about them to have a comment. I know that Nick was originally a guitar player when he first joined Riverdogs, because there was an existing guitar player that I told you about earlier. Nick moved onto bass, so Nick is a great guitar player. He can certainly play the parts that I can play; he doesn’t play them in the same style or maybe with the same ferocity, but he’s a very, very competent guitar player. To be honest though, I’m not familiar enough with the records they made without me to actually pass any comment.”

Wind the clock forward just over 27 years, and Vivian’s ‘second stab’ as part of the Riverdogs fold arrives in the form of July 2017’s California – an album written in different circumstances. “We had very little budget, and consequently very little time to make this record,” Vivian shares. “We don’t all live in Los Angeles any more – myself and Marc Danzeisen still live here. Rob lives in Ontario, Canada, which is 3,000 miles from here, and Nick lives in Nashville, Tennessee, which is about 2,000 miles from here, so Nick and Rob would have to fly in to LA. We had very, very little time to make the record, so we literally had two writing sessions with each session being three days. We would write six songs in three days, and then the following two days we would go into Marc’s home studio and cut the demos, so it was done exceptionally quickly. Having said that, I think that there’s enough collective experience within the band, now after all of these years that we’ve all been in the business, that we were able to do this. I don’t think we could’ve made a record under these circumstances 25 or 30 years ago.”

The majority of California’s tracks originated from a riff authored by the axe-slinger. “It was mostly just a jam kind of thing,” he discloses. “They’d say to me ‘Viv, have you got a riff?’ I’d start playing something, and we’d piece it together. Rob did bring in a couple of songs that he had started with his son Zander. ‘American Dream’ and ‘The Revolution Starts Tonight’ were those two ideas; Rob came to us with the basic outline of those songs, and we just had a go at making them Riverdogs songs. Everything except ‘American Dream’ and ‘The Revolution Starts Tonight’ pretty much started from a guitar idea of mine. They were very, very collaborative; I’m not saying I came in with songs, but I would start the ball rolling with the guitar riff and we’d make it into a song within a couple of hours. We really, really wrote quickly on this record.”

Albeit using Riverdogs’ May 1990 self-titled debut foray as a template, Vivian never revisited the platter in preparation. “I didn’t listen to it, although Nick Brophy is not only a talented musician and a bass player, but for many years he has also been a professional recording engineer, producer, and mixer in Nashville,” he commends. “Nick went to great lengths to study the sound of the original Riverdogs record, and even talked at length with Jeff Glixman on the phone a couple of times to pick his brain about how to approach recording and mixing the record. I did go to the locker and pull out all of the original amps and guitars that I used on the first Riverdogs record, so to that extent, yeah, we did try to make it as close as possible sonically to the original record.”

Using the May 1990 self-titled debut LP as a framework, California nevertheless avoids simply rehashing its earliest predecessor. “The only thing that we tried to copy was the intensity, and the style, and the sonics of the record,” the musician pinpoints. “I mean, the songs are totally different, although to an extent it is a concept record. A lot of the lyrical themes on the California album are extensions of the lyrical themes from the original record. Rob wrote the lyrics on the record; he told us before we had written any songs, that he had this idea to continue the themes and the stories from the characters. Not all of them are connected, but there is a bit of a thread to the album in that many of the songs on California are chapter two of the stories Rob told on the original Riverdogs album.

“If you listen to the original Riverdogs album, almost every song included a character and tells a story. I’m not saying every song on the California record is an extension of those, but many of them are. Even the name of the album, California, there’s certain references in the songs to the late 80s and certain places in southern California that we are familiar with. It’s kind of autobiographical in a way, hence the title California.”

Musical differences exist between California and Riverdogs’ May 1990 self-titled debut. “The major differences I hear between California and the debut Riverdogs album is that there’s less acoustic guitar on the California album,” Vivian highlights. “That’s mostly because back in the late 80s when I first joined the band and when we first met, Rob was writing pretty much on acoustic guitar and we tried to marry the acoustic and the Americana sound to my naturally heavy style of guitar playing, like really heavy hard rock, heavy blues.

“On this record, when we were writing the songs Rob was playing electric guitar but with a hollow body and a cleaner sort of a sound. In recent years, I think that’s what he has sort of gravitated more towards. There are a couple of songs on California where acoustic is prevalent, but I would say there is a lot less acoustic sound than what was on the debut record. To my ears, that’s the main sonic difference. There’s a load of electric guitar; I did a lot of guitar parts on the California album as I did on the debut Riverdogs album, and that was also part of the template we were following – that we wanted it to be very guitar-intense.”

The performer’s guitar work within the Riverdogs camp does not bear specific hallmarks in comparison to his outside offerings. “Not really, no – certainly not consciously on my behalf,” he argues. “I just play like I play. It’s really whether there’s enough room in that particular band to come throughout. Riverdogs is definitely more blues-influenced than Def Leppard or Last In Line, so I suppose of everything, I get a chance to channel my inner Paul Kosoff when I do that, or go back to my original roots – that is Rory Gallagher, who was my first guitar hero. Obviously when I play with Last In Line, it’s much more of a heavy metal approach. It’s much, much more aggressive playing in that band, and then with Def Leppard, the focus is on the vocals.

“We’re a very vocal-oriented band; the guitar parts are more a part of the song, as opposed to a vehicle for guitar solos. With Def Leppard, the guitar solos are always very concise. They’re very subservient to the song, which fits the nature of the band, so it’s a different kind of thing. I don’t deliberately… Or I’m certainly not aware of any different hats I put on as far as playing guitar-intense in Def Leppard, Last In Line, or Riverdogs. I just pick up my guitar and play to suit the song, regardless of who the band is.”

As referenced, Rory Gallagher was an early influence upon Vivian. “The first album that I ever had was Live In Europe from (May) 1972, and the first concert that I ever saw was by Rory Gallagher,” he augments. “Indeed, the second and the third concerts were by Rory Gallagher, because I grew up in Belfast. In the 70s, we didn’t get a lot of acts come over there. Rory was the only one who would come to the city every year, and play the Ulster Hall. Rory was the first guitar player where I dropped the needle on the album, and actually tried to figure out what he was playing. I’m entirely self-taught, and Rory was my first major influence, and I draw a lot of my physical style from him and from that influence.

“In later years, the only other guitar player who influenced me more than Rory Gallagher would’ve been Gary Moore, who was probably the most influential guitar player for me. Gary, again, was a guitar player who could play a multitude of styles. When I first heard Gary play, a friend of mine played me Colosseum II. It was Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum, and that was jazz fusion. Even then I wasn’t a huge fan of jazz fusion, I was totally blown away by the intensity that Gary Moore brought to his playing. It didn’t matter what style of music it was; if it was jazz, or if it was hard rock with Thin Lizzy, or if it was blues-influenced with his solo career. Gary Moore always played on a pin; he was always full-on, 100% committed to what he was doing, and that’s what appealed to me more than anything else, was Gary’s style. That was the biggest influence that I drew from him. He played like he meant it, and I’d like to think that I bring that same kind of approach to my playing.

“I do think that guitar players are capable of playing in more than one style. Music to me, I always make the equation that it’s kind of like food. I love Indian food, but I wouldn’t want to eat it seven days a week. Variety is what it’s all about, and it keeps it fresh and it keeps it interesting. As a guitar player, I like to be able to work with these different genres and in these different capacities. As a musician, I love to do different things. In Def Leppard, the greatest challenge for me is to sing. We all sing in every song, and it’s really, really challenging because we’re doing it live, and we do it really, really well.

“Then when I step into a band like Riverdogs and Last In Line, the challenge becomes much more guitar-focused. I feel very fortunate as a musician that I can exercise all of these different muscles, and continue to grow as a creative person. That’s why I started doing this in the first place, was to keep exercising that creative muscle. Otherwise, I believe you become stagnant and become jaded about it. Several years ago, I really kind of rediscovered my passion for guitar playing. I don’t want to ever let that slip. I’ve kind of got to keep moving, and keep busy. There’s a saying here in the States: ‘An object in motion stays in motion.’ So yeah, I wanna remain in motion for a while.”

Albeit rediscovering his passion for the instrument several years prior, the guitarist had never lost that passion per se. “No, not at all,” he cautions. “I’ve always had a passion for it, but I’ve kind of learnt how to pace myself. I think I took it a little bit too seriously for a few years. I don’t believe you can approach playing an instrument as purely a mechanical exercise; if your head isn’t in it, your heart’s not gonna be in it. I actually find I play better when I step away from the instrument at times. Like I said, it’s like food. If you eat Indian food three meals a day, seven days a week, you’re gonna tire of it really soon. I like to pace myself. There was a period of time where I would focus on playing guitar too much and I think it was to my detriment, because I was only focused on the mechanical aspect of the instrument and not enough on the emotional aspect.”

A follow-up to Def Leppard’s October 2015 self-titled full-length is a possibility. “I’m sure there will be,” Vivian muses. “We’re always writing songs. We just finished a couple of months of touring here in the States. We’ll get to it, but with Leppard, we’re not known as exactly being quick when it comes to making records, so it might be a while.”

As to which musical styles Def Leppard wish to pursue on future material, the axeman contends that “Def Leppard doesn’t necessarily pursue styles. We kind of make Def Leppard records at our own pace, so whenever the mood takes us, we’ll get in the studio and we’ll make another record, and it’ll sound like Def Leppard.”

Writing sessions have significantly progressed with respect to the follow-up to Last In Line’s February 2016 debut effort Heavy Crown. “We’re about 60% written for the new Last In Line record,” Vivian updates. “It sounds absolutely amazing; to me, it’s better than the Heavy Crown album. We go into the studio on 11th of September, again with Jeff Pilson (Dokken / Foreigner), and we’re super-excited about that.”

A release date has yet to be pencilled in. “That’s up to the record company,” the songwriter figures. “This is the difficult part of being in multiple bands. You don’t want to just release a record and not be able to do anything to promote it, so I’ve got to look at the schedule. We’ll deliver the album to our label by December, or maybe January at the latest. It’s up to them to decide when it’s released.”

Album number two from Last In Line will not necessarily deviate from the musical style established via Heavy Crown. “It’s going to be very similar, obviously,” Vivian divulges. “I mean, that’s the sound of the band. I would say the songs are a little bit more intricate, and some of the arrangements are a bit more riffy. We’re finding our feet as songwriters; we’re really getting to know Andrew Freeman, and how he writes. I would say it’s more riffy, more intricate, and a little bit more interesting perhaps – some great hooks. We haven’t written all of the album yet; like I said, we’re about 60% there, but it sounds great. It sound really, really exciting. I’m very pleased with the direction it’s heading in.”

The as-yet-untitled record will be bereft of the bass contributions of Jimmy Bain (ex-Rainbow), who died on January 23rd, 2016 at the age of 68 due to complications from lung cancer – several weeks prior to the release of Heavy Crown. Replacing is former Ozzy Osbourne member Phil Soussan, whose appointment was confirmed on April 11th of that year. “Losing Jimmy was a huge blow to the band, and obviously it does change the dynamic in terms of songwriting,” the axe-slinger laments. “Jimmy, Vinny (Appice, drums) and I worked very, very easily together, when it came to writing especially.

“We could just go in and knock out a song like no-one’s business, so yeah, it’s been a little bit different. Phil Soussan is about as close as we can get in terms of style and sound to someone like Jimmy. Phil has been great to work with. We were able to do a bunch of shows with Phil before we attempted the creative process, and the writing stage. I’m happy to say that so far, so good. He’s been onboard with it, and we’re all very pleased with how he has integrated into the band. We all miss Jimmy, though.”

On June 10th, 2013, Vivian revealed that he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Four years later in 2017, the guitarist’s health is a topic of conversation among fans. “It’s the least of my concerns, to be honest, but then again, it always was the least of my concerns – even when it was at its worst,” he tells. “One thing I can tell you is cancer is not gonna kill me. It’s either gonna be fast cars, or angry women, or too much red wine. I refuse to capitulate to cancer. I’ve always refused to give in to that fucking disease, and I continue my life. I’ve been very fortunate that for the last couple of years, I’ve progressed from doing chemotherapy and doing stem cell transplants and all that nonsense.

“I was very fortunate that I was able to participate in a clinical trial for a new drug called pembrolizumab; I’m fortunate that I’m one of the few people – maybe 20-30% of people – that it actually works for. For the last two years, I’ve been getting an infusion of that for about once a month, and with very, very minimal side effects; no hair loss, minimal nausea, or tiredness, or whatever. I’ve been able to continue my life and my work. To be honest, the hardest thing about all of it has been scheduling the travel, and having to fly back to LA for once a month, from Singapore, or London, or New York, or wherever I happen to be to get an infusion.

“It’s the least of my concerns. It’s like going to the dentist to me, now. It’s just routine maintenance, and my doctors are happy enough for me to continue this treatment for the foreseeable future, which is fine by me. Like I said, the hardest part is the scheduling and the travel. It allows me to continue my work, and that’s a big, big part of dealing with it for me. If I wasn’t able to work, this disease would kill me, and of that I’m certain. As I said before though, as long as I can keep working, it makes me happy.”

The musician’s hefty musical slate is a source of relief, as given his Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis, it would be worrisome if we did not hear from him for several months.“I do think that that’s people’s natural instincts,” he remarks. “With a cancer diagnosis, you have to put everything in your life on hold and just focus on that 100%. That really depends on the nature of the cancer though, and the severity of it – what stage your cancer is at. I was very fortunate; I caught my cancer reasonably early, and Hodgkin’s lymphoma is not as severe as stage four lung cancer or brain cancer. It’s nothing like that. There were a couple of years where it was pretty rough, but now I’m at a stage where I can manage it and continue working.

“I’m glad that I never really put my sole focus on my recovery and stopped working, because I do think for me at least – everyone thinks and feels differently – that would have been a death sentence. I had a hard time convincing some of the people I work with that it was better for me, and I realised that they had my best interests at heart. They wanted me to stay at home and convalesce, but that’s not how I roll. Fuck the cancer; I’ve got a big middle finger for it.”

California was released on July 7th, 2017 via Frontiers Music Srl.

Interview published in July 2017. All promotional photographs by Kelsey Danzeisen.

Melodic metal outfit The Ferrymen was formed at the behest of Frontiers Music Srl president Serafino Perugino, the trio consisting of the following personnel; Lords Of Black frontman Ronnie Romero (also of Rainbow), Primal Fear guitarist and keyboardist Magnus Karlsson (also of Magnus Karlsson’s Freefall), and drummer Mike Terrana (previously of Rage, Masterplan and Axel Rudi Pell, among others).

“Frontiers were trying to put together some good musicians,” Ronnie expands. “Serafino from Frontiers phoned me about this idea to make an album with Magnus Karlsson. I found this very exciting, because I’ve been a big fan of Magnus from the very beginning of his career; when he did the Last Tribe band, and when he did the Allen/Lande project. So, it was a really exciting idea to me. Then I started to work with Magnus on the songs, and then Mike Terrana came into the line-up. We made an album really easily, and quickly.”

At the time of writing, The Ferrymen are bereft of a bassist, Karlsson handling bass duties within the studio. The recruitment of a four-stringer isn’t in the pipeline. “Not at the moment, because we don’t have any intention to make it live or do some shows,” the singer explains. “It’s just a studio project. Magnus Karlsson recorded the bass and keyboards for the album. At the moment, there is no intention to have a bass player.”

The Ferrymen lend their moniker from a composition featured on their June 2017 self-titled debut full-length studio album. “One of the first songs that we recorded was the second song on the album, called ‘Ferryman’,” Ronnie cites. “Then we thought it would be a great idea to call the band The Ferrymen, because it was a really nice idea for the cover artwork. We were just looking for a name. The idea came to us, and it was really easy in fact to pick the name.”

‘Ferryman’ takes inspiration from Greek mythology. “It’s about this character who carries the souls from one shore to another during death,” the vocalist shares. “You can see it on the cover artwork – this character carrying the souls of the dead people – so I think it’s really nice and good for the heavy metal image, to have this kind of cover artwork on the album. I put some ideas on the table for it. I think Stan did a really good job with the cover artwork, because in fact it’s a hand-drawn cover. I think it’s really cool.”

Musically speaking, meanwhile, The Ferrymen take inspiration from various cross-sections of hard rock and metal. “I discussed this with Magnus and Mike, when we met in Madrid last time,” Ronnie recalls. “Obviously, it’s heavy metal – it’s power metal, or whatever – but we have some really good and different elements from heavy metal, like more melodic songs. The vocal lines are really melodic, and we have really strong choruses on the songs. Mike is kind of a groovy metal drummer, and we have some prog-ish elements. It’s not easy to put the style of this project into just one direction, so I think it’s kind of a heavy metal, classic rock, progressive, groovy group. I don’t know (laughs).”

And as well, specific band influences emanate from various cross-sections of hard rock and metal, although the influence of Magnus Karlsson cannot be overstated. “The album and the songs are similar to the Allen/Lande project, obviously because Magnus Karlsson is the songwriter,” the frontman laughs. “You can see, hear and listen to Magnus Karlsson’s way of writing the songs, and then I tried to put my own influences on the vocals. I have really classic influences from classic bands from the 70s and 80s; bands like Dio and Black Sabbath, and obviously Deep Purple and Rainbow. I think we have a really good mix of influences on the record.”

Ronnie happens to be familiar with the discography crafted by his bandmate. “I know Magnus’ works from the very beginning with his progressive band The Last Tribe, and then I really fell in love with the Allen/Lande albums – with Jørn Lande and Russell Allen, the first three records (September 2005’s The Battle, May 2007’s The Revenge, and November 2010’s The Showdown,” he lists. “The most important thing to me with the Magnus music is the melody; he always brought really melodic songs, and with really, really nice and strong choruses on the songs. To me, it’s a really attractive thing about Magnus’ music.”

Songwriting fell to the Primal Fear axeman, the tracks being authored during the summer of 2016. “He sent me the songs almost finished,” the performer tells. “I just needed to put my voice on the songs. I think naturally from all of the musicians, you have an idea, but like I told you, for Magnus, the melody lines are really important. So, I think he probably has kind of a melodic idea about the chorus or whatever, and starts to work from that point. I really love to work with Magnus because he always thinks about the singer. For the singer, it’s really important when a songwriter sends you a song focusing on the vocals and not the other instruments. So, I think it’s really important, and it’s definitely one of the highlights in terms of Magnus’ way of songwriting.”

The Ferrymen consists of 11 compositions, in all, the 12th a bonus affair. “We need to have a bonus track on the CD for the Japanese market, so we recorded 12 songs and have just been discussing the bonus track,” Ronnie divulges. “In fact, it’s one of the songs which is on the original track listing, but just recorded acoustically. Like I told you, it was really, really easy. It was really fast, because it was like, I don’t know, maybe three months just recording the songs – like the demos – and then recording them for the album.”

The Ferrymen happens to be a lighter proposition in comparison to Lords Of Black. “It’s different,” the entertainer agrees. “I think like I told you, The Ferrymen songs are a little bit more melodic, and more focused on the singer. The difference with Lords Of Black is with Lords Of Black, we have four strong musicians with high skills, and you need to put all of the skills on the song at the same time. Probably the Lords Of Black songs are a little bit more complicated to listen to for the fans. It’s not easy to listen to for the first time, so there’s a different way to write or whatever. I think that The Ferrymen songs are easier to listen to for the fans, and with Lords Of Black, you need to listen three or four times to understand the music. I think this is the most important difference with Lords Of Black.”

The Ferrymen’s lyrical fare also arrived from the pen of Karlsson. “We have some really strong, heavy metal songs, like ‘Ferryman’ and ‘Cry Wolf’ or even ‘Welcome To My Show’,” Ronnie submits. “We talk about the heavy metal way of life, and then we have some love songs like ‘One Heart’ or ‘Eternal Night’. We have this kind of universal message that you can defend, and that you can express in a loving way or even in other ways. I think we have really different songs, and I think that’s very important for us.”

Each individual’s parts were recorded in separate locations. “Magnus recorded the guitars, the keyboards, and bass in his home studio in Sweden, and then Mike Terrana recorded the drums in his home studio in Italy,” the singer details. “Then I recorded all of the vocals in Madrid, in Cadillac Blood Studios with my bandmate from Lords Of Black – Andy the drummer. It was kind of a test for the next Lords Of Black recording, because it was the first time I recorded at Cadillac Blood Studios in Madrid with my bandmate Andy. We’ve been trying to test some new microphones, and new equipment to record.

“We found the sound that we were looking for really easy and really fast, and finally Simone from DGM – who mixed and mastered the album – found it really easy to work with the vocal tracks since we had a really good sound. I think it was really easy and really fast; I recorded all of the songs in six days or something like that, so it was really fast to record this album. So yeah, we’ve been trying some new stuff, and I think he will use it on the next recording sessions with my band Lords Of Black.

A second The Ferrymen jaunt is being planned. “In fact, we have the idea to record a new album probably in 2018, or in a couple of years,” Ronnie notes. “This is just because the experience of working with Magnus was really great and really easy, and I think the fans really like the results. We will see what happens in the coming months after the release, and yeah, we will probably make something more in the future.”

A musical direction has yet to be mapped. “I think it’s too early to talk about that,” the vocalist muses. “I don’t know if Mike will be involved, or if we need to look for new musicians, or if we will play live and do some shows. I don’t know. Everything is a possibility, and we will see what happens with the release, because the album has just been released. We will see what happens, but obviously everything is a possibility in the future.”

As referenced, a third Lords Of Black studio proper is in development. “We are already working on the third album from Lords Of Black, so probably the beginning of 2018 we will release the new album,” Ronnie observes. “We have done almost all of the demos for the songs, and after my commitments with Mr. Ritchie Blackmore (guitarist, Rainbow / Blackmore’s Night / ex-Deep Purple), we will go to the studio to record the songs. Then it’s up to Frontiers as to the release date, but like I told you, at the beginning of 2018 we will have a new Lords Of Black album on the market.”

Ronnie Romero

A re-recorded version of Rainbow staple composition ‘I Surrender’ was digitally released on May 26th. Further material has been recorded with Rainbow, perennially spearheaded by former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore.

“In fact, one of the songs we have recorded is new material, and is an unreleased song,” the frontman confirms. “I don’t know when that song is going to be released, but it’s a really nice and good song. I think after the shows in the UK, we will see what happens as to the intentions of Ritchie Blackmore to make some new music, or do some new shows, or whatever. I don’t have any idea right now. Probably we will have some idea at the end of June, after the UK tour.”

The unreleased number hearkens back to Rainbow’s earlier days. “It’s really surprising,” Ronnie feels. “Ritchie sent me this song some months ago. I expected something different, but the song sounds like the early days of Rainbow – the first album, the Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow album (August 1975) – so I think the fans will really like it.”

The existence of fresh Rainbow material leads to speculation with respect to a fully-fledged LP of new Rainbow offerings. “It’s an idea, of course,” the performer recognises. “We’ve been recording some different stuff; some new songs, and then some songs from the old albums of Rainbow. Like I told you before though, it depends on Ritchie. After this UK tour, we will make some decisions about recording a complete album, or just a couple of more songs, or whatever. It’s all about Ritchie’s feelings after this month. Right now, I don’t know his ideas for the band, but I’ve got the feeling that if the shows go well, probably we will make some different stuff. If the shows don’t go well, June will probably be the end of the new Rainbow (laughs).”

A compilation of re-recorded Rainbow tracks also seems to be a distinct possibility. “Songs from different eras have been recorded, like ‘I Surrender’ which has already been released, and then some songs from the Dio era, and then a song from the Graham Bonnet era,” Ronnie informs. “It’s generally like a demo, so we will see what happens with them.”

The Ferrymen was released on June 2nd, 2017 via Frontiers Music Srl.

Interview published in June 2017. All promotional photographs by Antonio Garci.

Studio City, California-based glam metal vocalist Stephen Pearcy, founding member of Ratt, set Sucker Punch as the title of his fourth full-length solo studio album as far back as May 2011, the opus slated for issue later that year. Pearcy’s fourth solo affair would eventually emerge in January 2017, its moniker revised to Smash, the long-player taking proper shape more recently.

“It probably started about a year-and-a-half ago, at least,” Stephen estimates. “I put a batch of songs together, and was getting ready to start the process. I was on and off the road, going into the studio. I did end up tracking four songs, and as of four to six months ago, I got involved with Frontiers. They liked some of the stuff that I was working on, and so I actually just had my guys and said ‘We’re just gonna go down another street here, and forget about those songs. We’ll start afresh, and make a new record.’ And, away we went.”

Among Smash’s central compositions happens to be ‘Can’t Take It’, which was mixed and mastered by Beau Hill, Hill having produced Ratt’s initial four full-lengths. “I wish I could’ve had him on the whole record, but the album title Smash came from that song,” the singer tells. “I mention it in that song, that we were gonna smash, and it just stuck in my head. The more I thought about it, I felt this is a very strong word. It can mean a lot of things, but one thing it does means is power. Attack mode (laughs), the final statement.

“I kind of went with it, and the artwork was perfect for the record and what I’m talking about, and the delivery. The subject matter of these songs aren’t party songs; they’re not necessarily relationship songs. There’s a fun song in there too, but everything else is pretty involved. It’s probably the most extensive lyric writing I’ve done in a while, and it’s something that I can’t really do with Ratt either, is write these kinds of lyrics. It was pretty interesting how this kind of evolved into its own thing – Smash.”

Smash’s lyrical content encompasses a wide range of themes. “With Smash, the topics are anywhere from extra-terrestrials to life, to death, to protection, to underworld, above ground, space, time,” Stephen lists. “I wasn’t trying to make it a mind crime; I just wanted to dwell into things that have my interest, that people don’t really think about sometimes. I had some fun with some things. ‘Ten Miles Wide’ is not about a relationship – that will actually be our first single video, that we shoot next week. It’s about a relationship between them and us, them being these other entities out there. I don’t preach anything I say on anybody, but I believe in some things – extra-terrestrial, or underworld – so I dwell in it. It’s nothing that hasn’t been said, but for me it’s quite different.

“Then I wrote a song about my daughter and how people are to people, so there are different subject matters. This is the second and only record that I put lyrics in, and it will be the last. I like people to figure out what I’m saying lyrically, so they listen to it and get the music over and over. This record actually needed lyric sheets though, so people wouldn’t be confused.”

August 1990’s Detonator – Ratt’s fifth studio jaunt – was the inaugural Pearcy-related effort to include lyric inserts. “I was reluctant to do that,” the frontman recalls. “Again though, I don’t know why, but with this record, they asked me to insert the lyrics. I said ‘I don’t really do that.’ I’m from the (Led) Zeppelin school of having something to speak, of having people figure out what you’re saying – even if you’re talking about the big party, or whatever. I reluctantly agreed, though. I said ’Yeah, I’ll put the lyrics in there. Sure. I think I should.’ There’s too much going on here, but I won’t again.

“I don’t want to put lyrics in my records, no. When I grew up with Zeppelin, (Judas) Priest, (Black) Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult, all of these bands in the 70s. It was nice to figure out what they were saying, and all you saw was the record cover and some crazy artwork, and that’s what you went with – your imagination. You can make it your own song when you do that, not having lyrics in there. People can make the song into whatever they want and keep painting the picture, instead of ‘Here’s the picture. This is what it is.’ When you put lyrics in there, you tend to not leave the door open to imagination and your own assessment.”

‘They’ who requested Stephen insert Smash’s lyrics within the booklet happens to be Frontiers Music Srl, Stephen’s solo contract with the label having been confirmed on September 14th, 2016. “I knew somebody from the old Atlantic Records days, who got a hold of me – Derek Shulman I believe,” he shares. “They said that they were interested, but I had had contact with them years ago previously and nothing transpired. I pretty much do my own thing. I’ve got my own independent label, Top Fuel, but the same can be said for Smash – it’s still Top Fuel with Frontiers. It was a pleasure that they wanted to be involved, though. Right from the get go, I told them that ‘This isn’t just a standard ‘I’m gonna write songs and just throw them out there.’ I’m gonna make a real record.’ We set out to accomplish something, and we did.”

Stephen Pearcy

In accomplishing the feat of cutting Smash, co-conspirators were involved. “I co-wrote ‘Can’t Take It’ and there’s another song on there that I co-wrote with somebody, but the majority of the record was written by me and my lead guitar player Erik Ferentinos,” the composer accredits. “He’s been in my solo band for 14 years, and he was just a writing machine. We wrote so many songs, including myself. I wrote full songs, but with the stuff that he was coming up with, musically I was just overwhelmed with. It ended up being Ferentinos and Pearcy writing the core of it, yeah.”

“Smash is much more involved,” Stephen submits. “It was a much more sobering place in every way. We wanted to take our time. We wanted it to have substance, diversity. Every song had the same attention, and we methodically thought it through. We didn’t want to rush it; we just wanted to deliver the best record possible, and with that, we needed to take our time. The record was a real thought out, step-by-step process, and that’s how it differs extremely. I could write a record in a day (laughs). With this record though, so many things actually changed. You could be in the studio tracking a song, and then a better song would come up, and I’d say ‘Put that song away. We’re working on this now.’ We really wanted the best record possible, and in every way.”

Differences exist between the mainman’s solo endeavours and work within the Ratt camp. “With the solo stuff, I have more room to move and try different things, and grooves, and be heavier,” he critiques. “It is a harder project in terms of how I deliver music. With Ratt, it’s a schematic of who does what. Whether it’s one guy bringing in a song… Most of the times we collectively write. It was the four of us – myself, Robb (Crane, former bassist), Warren (DeMartini, guitars), and Juan (Croucier,, bass) – or it could’ve been two of us, three of us. That’s how the difference is, and it’s a whole different animal. We know what we’re actually setting out to do. On that note, Warren and I have already started demoing up songs for a Ratt record, which would be our eighth. We would like to get started on that at the end of the year as we re-establish the brand, so to speak.”

The demo process for Ratt’s eighth studio platter is in its early stages. “It’s hard to say, because it has just started. We have two songs, but they’re taking on their own entity,” Stephen enthuses. “It’s melodic, and it’s gonna be heavier. Our direction is the Ratt EP (August 1983) and Out Of The Cellar (March 1984) – that’s where we want this to end up. We want it to be really good. That we’ve established from the get go, that we’re gonna take the same approach as I did with Smash. We want to take our time, and make sure it’s done 150% to the best of our ability. We’re very lucky; we’re fortunate that we can actually be allowed that right now.”

A 2018 release is being targeted. “We’re gonna hopefully start recording at the end of the year, because this year we’re already doing sporadic festivals and shows, and might end up on a tour,” the lyricist explains. “We’d like to tap into a lot of other countries that have been neglected in the past. Next year, a new Ratt record.”

Stephen announced his departure from the Ratt fold on April 24th, 2014, his re-entry to the ranks confirmed on November 29th, 2016 amid a complex legal battle over the moniker involving drummer Bobby Blotzer. “It’s not a surprising thing,” Stephen says with respect to his return. “It’s not that I quit, or anything. I have a tendency… Or Warren, myself and Juan. We don’t want to go out for a year or two – we just don’t. We find that there are other things in life – other things that we like to do and accomplish – but as far as the band Ratt, we just wanted some time off. It had nothing to do with anything else. We just wanted time off, and that was it. It just got turned into something else.”

How Ratt’s hiatus was ‘turned into something else’ has been a point of discussion. “I can answer that pretty deliberately,” the musician begins. “It was one person who had nothing else to fall back on, and decided that they were going to go out and try to change the course of history – its members, its achievements, accomplishments. Unfortunately, it happened, but the dust has settled and justice is peace. It’s very unfortunate, but our audience isn’t stupid. They’ve run with us for years, and that was the worst of it. That this person went out there and didn’t let anybody know that the original members weren’t in this project – what they decided to call the real deal Ratt. If they would’ve left it alone and just said ‘I am so and so from this band Ratt,’ that would’ve been a good place for everybody. They got greedy though, and couldn’t make a living doing it on their own merits (laughs).”

Should an entity touring under the Ratt moniker boast solely one original member, that respective entity is arguably not Ratt. “Of course not,” Stephen agrees. “I go out there and tour, but I don’t claim I’m the band. I created it and I’m the singer, but they are still my solo tours and my solo projects, and my solo music. I can stand on my own merits, and so can everybody else. Me and the other guys, we all have different things to do. We’ve been doing this – very fortunately – for 30-plus years. You just don’t throw a wrench into something like that. It’s criminal (laughs). It’s criminal to our integrity.”

The legal status of Ratt’s moniker has been clouded of late. “It was very confusing, but it’s not any more,” the entertainer stresses. “It’s all said and done. It’s taken care of, and the final nail in their coffin is coming up real soon. We just really try not to give it attention, but we just want to let people know reality in as few words as possible, because the attention shouldn’t be on that. It should be on our music and our legacy, and our accomplishments, and what we’re doing musically. That’s what it should be about.”

An eighth studio offering featuring Pearcy behind the microphone will be issued under the Ratt name. “We’re already doing festivals, headlining festivals – M3 is coming up,” Stephen references. “Yeah, it’s Ratt. It’s the original band, and that’s what it is. The other person cannot call themselves Ratt any more. 2017 is a whole new year, like 1984.”

Returning to the topic of Smash, writing sessions began afresh following the inking of a solo contract with Frontiers. “It was the same direction, but the songs were more aggressive,” the performer judges. “We were really going into a different mode, so to speak. The environment wasn’t that sober, meaning we were still crazy. With Smash, it was like a clean environment and in every way. We wanted to be tip top, and the same is going to go for Ratt. There’s nothing diluted, cloudy, or that’s gonna get in the way of actually doing the best you can, if you know what I mean. There’s less party, and more artistry. Not that we were ever artistic when we partied it up (laughs). I’ve recorded records laying down with somebody and I’ve recorded records standing up, and I prefer the latter nowadays. We’re very fortunate at this time to be able to do what we still do, or I am, and I appreciate it.”

Said writing sessions spawned leftover tracks. “We wrote so much stuff, Erik and myself,” Stephen reveals. “Some songs are way heavy, and we wrote probably like 25 songs during the whole process of writing. I recorded four of the songs that didn’t make the record, but they’re available out there – that didn’t go on Smash. I still have a couple of songs that are done that will eventually come out, but Smash was a whole new thing. It was started from scratch, but there were a lot of songs, yes.”

When Smash’s successor will arrive is unclear. “It’ll happen whenever I…,” the singer begins. “Solo records, to me they just happen. I have to be in the right place at that time. I don’t just say ‘I’m gonna do a solo record’ – there’s something that urges me to do it. With Ratt, we plan it, and it’s that kind of a process because of how we are structured as writers collectively. With my solo stuff, it’s pretty much just me writing songs myself, or collaborating with friends who play guitar, or my right-hand guy – Erik Ferentinos. We have such a great relationship writing. It’s crazy; we can sit down and write songs all day long, but now we actually take a different approach to what we’re actually doing.”

Recording sessions for Smash were a relaxed affair. “We took our time during the recording process,” Stephen remembers. “Our engineer who mixed and mastered with us is my bass player. He owns a studio; I’ve recorded every record at his place, and we know what we’re doing. He was also in an early version of Ratt back in the day, so the recording process was very comfortable for us. The live band is the studio band. When we go out and do shows, we go right back into the studio because we love that live feel, that live intensity. We try to keep it, so the process has some live kind of a vibe, but you go through the same pattern of making sure that everything’s right.”

In addition, cutting vocals was a relaxed affair. “With Smash, it was interesting because I wanted to try different things, but I didn’t want to step out of my boundaries,” the frontman notes. “I know who I am, and who my voice is. I don’t do things that I can’t do live, number one. It doesn’t matter. Anything that I do is going to be Ratt-related, but I don’t claim to be some opera, Pavarotti-type singer – my voice is just what it is. I like it live to be different. I try different things live, but in the studio, it is what it is. I deliver the best that I can, and fortunately I have the kind of voice where I can do it. My voice is holding up better than ever, and I’m happy about that. I don’t abuse it like I used to, so maybe I’m growing up. I don’t know (laughs).”

A carnival-esque atmosphere denotes Smash’s cover artwork. “Correct,” Stephen ponders. “His name is the Smasher, and my art guy… I’m the art director, but my art guy – the one I mentioned – he came up with the idea of the Smasher, and I thought that it was so perfect with what I was talking about on the record. The light can actually be the dark; the light can actually be the black. If you notice, he has a halo above his horns. I’m not portraying any negativity here; I’m letting people know that the good and the ugly are capable of smashing you, and we have become a part of that program.”

A music video will be filmed for the track ‘Ten Miles Wide’. “It’s gonna be conceptual,” the songwriter divulges. “We’re gonna have fun with it; it’s gonna have a different kind of vibe.”

Huntington Beach, California-based metal group Avenged Sevenfold issued seventh full-length studio album The Stage – their first for the Capitol label – in October 2016. A January 2017 trek to British shores has witnessed the assortment perform arena dates, with support from the likes of Disturbed and In Flames. Metal Forces spoke to rhythm guitarist Zacky Vengeance on Avenged Sevenfold’s tour bus ahead of their performance on the night of the 19th at the Motorpoint Arena in Cardiff, Wales.

“Basically, we come up with ideas on our own,” Zacky reflects, discussing the songwriting process for The Stage. “We play with our instruments and see if anything kind of sticks, and then we kind of conceptualise the ideas of where we would like to see the album headed, like which direction we would like to go in. For us, this album was really about incorporating unique drumming – like we did on albums when Rev was with us, like City Of Evil (June 2005) – and then expanding on that. Then from there, it’s just getting together and writing and really trying to perfect everything, and then taking it to the studio. It’s a long, gruelling process (laughs).”

The Stage marks the recording debut of former Bad Religion drummer Brooks Wackerman, whose appointment was revealed on November 4th, 2015. The firing of sticksman Arin Ilejay had been confirmed on July 23rd of that year. “One of things that always set us apart was having a drummer like The Rev (James Sullivan) with us,” the axeman submits. “After he passed away, we knew that it was gonna be really hard to fill that void. We brought in a young kid named Arin to tour with us, and he played on the Hail To The King (August 2013) album. He’s a brilliant drummer, but doesn’t have the same… I guess way of writing that The Rev had.

“We were just really missing that element of our songwriting, and Brooks was always a drummer who we were fond of for his unique style, coming from the punk rock scene and a famous family of drummers. We asked him if he would be interested, and he was interested. We jammed together, and it was definitely a perfect fit for us musically.”

The Stage happens to be Avenged Sevenfold’s “most creative affair,” Zacky reckons. “I feel like we have a lot of albums that are very diverse, but I feel with this album we’re literally taking all of the styles of metal and hard rock and doing our own spin on it, which hasn’t really been done. Incorporating drum beats that haven’t really been used to fill up verses, and doing time signatures that a lot of rock bands stay away from.

“That gives it more of an almost progressive feel, but it still maintains a lot of listenability which is hard to achieve, because there’s so many metal bands just doing the same thing – one or two beats fast, double-bass, screaming on top of it or singing on top of it – and there are bands that do it so well. For us, it was trying to really step out and kind of create our own place within the rock and metal world, and not try to do anything that’s already been done.”

Avenged Sevenfold’s musical preoccupations are a conscious pursuit. “It’s always been a conscious thing for us to do whatever will separate us from the pack, and make us happy musically,” the composer reveals. “We really wanted to try and come up with something very creative at a time when a lot of bands rehash riffs over and over again, though. With Hail To The King – our last album – we obviously wore our influences on our sleeve, and it was a blatant attempt to turn on our younger generation of fans to more classic sounding metal. With that, it kind of got their attention. It was almost like the gateway drug to heavier, more melodic music, so we had a plan and it seemed to work.

“With this album, we wanted to really show off our instrumentation and time signatures, and long, adventurous songs. Once you can get a fan to listen to an album a handful of times and really have a lot of substance for them to grasp, then you’re looking at having a fan that really appreciates what you do for life, and can appreciate coming to see it live. That’s what bands like Pink Floyd and bands like Rush and even the Metallicas of this world have, which is long, ambitious songs that pull in all different directions.”

Recording sessions for The Stage were helmed by Joe Barresi. “He’s great,” Zacky enthuses. “He’s a cool cat, man. He’s definitely calm and collected, and really passionate about organic tones, fucking with pedals, and just sitting there and playing with a plethora of different amps. Everything with him, he wants to make it as natural and organic. In a day and age where all albums are cut and pasted and sampled… Every metal band album you listen to now has samples placed on every drum. It’s like ‘What’s the point of playing on a real kit and going to the studio when you can just play on an electronic kit?’ For us, working with Joe, we said ‘We want drums that are real drums. Mike them, put them in a good room, and make them sound good. That’s how they’re gonna be, and if they don’t sound perfect, that’s alright because that’s what they really sound like.’

“We didn’t want any of that, just overproduced bullshit that you hear so much of. To me, it just makes me kind of sick nowadays. Iit was cool to be the first band to have a polished sounding album, but when every band sounds the same? We wanted to take a step in the direction of Led Zeppelin-era bands and Black Sabbath-era bands that had a little more dynamics.”

One wishes to be sonically heavy, and yet not so raw that the respective tracks sonically resemble demo outings. “It’s difficult, and it takes many, many months in the studio,” the axe-slinger shares. “Recording albums, it’s a very difficult process to make a professional sounding album when you’re doing things organically. You need a good team of people, and you need good musicians and players. It’s more difficult. When you look at the Led Zeppelin albums and stuff, those things took a long time to make. A lot of bands nowadays go into the studio, and they can have an album done in two or three weeks. For us, it was spending a lot of time, and really trying to make every song it’s own creation.”

Zacky isn’t as enamoured with the technical aspects of music, per se. “For me personally, it’s whatever gets the job done,” he reasons. “What makes our band so unique is that we have a crazy dynamic where Synyster’s rig is as high tech as it comes. He’s got all of the pedals, and all of the different amps and processors, and all that shit. For me, I have barely any of that. I keep it really, really simple, because I’m pretty punk rock. For me, I think less is more, so we have two very different philosophies, but that’s what gives us something unique I think.”

A science fiction concept was lyrically devised for The Stage. “Basically, it’s kind of taking our place in the world,” the musician details. “It talks about where humans currently fit into this universe, and what’s happening in the world of technology, and where we’re headed, and our resilience as a race of people to look back at history and try not to repeat it. It’s basically kind of like the album cover; just taking our small planet, travelling out a thousand light years, and looking at how our planet is small and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things, but yet how important we are to all of it at the same time.”

The Stage’s October 28th, 2016 arrival was a surprise release, the platter lacking a marketing campaign prior to its issue, or any forewarning for that matter. “It was about doing something for our fans in a day and age when music has gone so far away from what it was when I was growing up,” Zacky divulges. “We used to go and hang out at the record store, me and Matt our singer, every day after school. We would scrounge up whatever money we could have, talk to the person working at the store, look at the album covers, read the song titles, and look at how long the songs were, and decide on which album we were gonna take home and listen to for that month. We didn’t have a lot of money. Once you bought an album, you were stuck with it; you had to listen to it, and fall in love with it.

“Nowadays, record labels throw a single out three months before an album comes out. If that doesn’t stick, they throw another single out, and then they throw a fan single out, and then they throw another song before an album comes out. So, then half the album’s out. We wanted to give our fans a representation of the album from beginning to end, leaving no multiple singles. We wanted them to take it home, and be the first people to have an opinion on it.”

Of The Stage’s track selections, favourite compositions have emerged for the guitarist. “My favourite two songs, and they have been for a while are…,” he begins. “I love ‘The Stage’ and I really love ‘Angels’. I think that’s a great representation of what we’re aiming to accomplish with this album, which is really just trying to have a smart, ambitious, very musical and thought-provoking album that captures our performance in the studio. I think those songs really do that, and kind of capture where our heads are at lyrically and visually – just us humans trying to figure out our place in this world and in this universe. I think the songs are a good representation.”

Where Avenged Sevenfold will venture and how much further Avenged Sevenfold can venture from hereon in is uncertain, the metallers having achieved considerable success already. “We’ve always set our sights far, far in advance,” Zacky muses. “For us, there’s no cruise control. There’s no moving backwards; the rocket ship is taking off, and there’s only one choice but to keep moving up. I have no interest in backtracking. I wanted to make crazy songs and put on the best shows for our fans, and I want those fans to grow with us and be a generational band where their kids can enjoy it. There are bands that are capable of doing that, but it’s difficult.

“Only time will tell, but look at a band like Black Sabbath. My dad saw them in concert, and then I have seen them in concert, and I saw them with my dad. I’d love for nothing more than my son to grow up loving them as well, and I think that’s what’s so great about heavy metal as a genre. There’s not a whole lot of pop acts that do that; there’s not a whole lot of multi-generational pop bands. For us, it’s always looking forward and doing the best that we can, and putting on the best show that we can by any means necessary, and never looking back.”